After Haywood County Schools administration pulled “Dear Martin” from a 10th grade English II class , The Smoky Mountain News caught up with author Nic Stone to get her thoughts on the issue.

Students at Tuscola High School will no longer be able to read “Dear Martin,” (Crown Publishing Group, 2017) after administration decided the book is too inappropriate to use as assigned reading. 

By Boyd Allsbrook • SMN Contributor | What do To Kill A Mockingbird, Harry Potter, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and 1984 all have in common? Apart the obvious fact of their bookhood, you’d struggle to find anything thematically similar between them. But this assortment of classics, modern novels, and fantasies are all related in an important way. All have, at some point, been banned from schools or libraries. 

My mom was a librarian and my dad an English teacher so books were always stacked on the dining room table or tossed on the floor beside recliners. As a young girl, I carried a novel with me all the time. 

My very favorite book was The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I remember hiding it on the shelf at my elementary school library so no one else could check it out. I think I read it at least 10 times in a three-year span. It’s funny I didn’t ask my parents to just buy it for me, but these were the days before Amazon and there was something magical about holding it in my possession for only a short period of time. 

Dawn Gilchrist-Young doesn’t just read and teach books, she defends them.

As chair of the English department for Swain County High School, Gilchrist-Young is joining “Banned Books Weeks”, which is a nationwide celebration this week in honor of one of our greatest freedoms.