Poetry News | Politics

Chris Abani banned from Florida school’s summer reading list

By Harriet Staff

Poet and professor Chris Abani‘s award-winning novel Graceland charts a Nigerian boy’s transformation into a street smart Elvis impersonator. It sounds benign enough, but the book was removed from a 10th grade summer reading list at a Jacksonville, Fla. high school after a parent complained about the graphic content of the book. (An aside: Nigerian-born Abani has been imprisoned more than once in his homeland for his writing and work in the theater.)

The Los Angeles Times has more:

Graceland includes passages of brutal violence, but it is the sexual content of a torture scene that the Florida mother found objectionable.

She was “outraged,” JAX-4 TV reported. The television station received an e-mail requesting that it investigate; the mother making the complaint did not appear in the report.

The book was one of three on the standard reading list for 10-graders, along with Runner by Carl Deuker and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, coming-of-age stories set in Seattle and Nigeria, respectively. Students were instructed to read two of the three books over the summer. Honors students had a slightly different list; Abani’s book appeared there as well . . .

Posted in Poetry News, Politics on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 by Harriet Staff.