Banned Books: Philomena Polefrone and the ABA’s fight to Protect Free Expression

In our latest episode of the Libro.fm Podcast, we talk to Philomena Polefrone, PhD about her role in advocating for intellectual freedom through the American Booksellers Association. The discussion covers the history of banned books, grassroots organizing, and the legal challenges involved in defending diverse literature.

Libro.fm: You mentioned the freedom of expression group that you specifically work with, and I was wondering if you could share an overview of how the ABA (American Booksellers Association) and the sub-teams are working with bookstores when it comes to fighting book bans?

Philomena: Yeah, so ABFE (American Booksellers for Free Expression) was created in 1990, which […] two facts about that, one, I was created in the same year, so that is meant to be. Two, 1990 was just after the book ban crisis of the eighties, which had some similarities but was a little bit different. A lot of people think about Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and so many other wonderful books in terms of what was targeted then.

But we can get into the whole history of the culture war in another moment. So ABFE came out of that. It actually used to be ABFFE […], the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and it was an independent organization that then became subsumed into the American Bookseller’s Association in the aughts at some point. And so now ABFE is a major one of […] the advocacy priorities of the American Booksellers Association. There’s only four of us on the advocacy team, but there’s only two of us who are only on the advocacy team. It’s me and Dave Grogan, who’s the director of ABFE and also does a ton of incredible work in terms of small business advocacy.

Libro.fm: You mentioned that you worked at a bookstore and then you were teaching, and now, you’re here. I would love to hear how that journey happened? And if your experience as a bookseller or teacher influences what you’re doing now?

Philomena: I was a bookseller at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn—incredible store. I was just out of college and knew I loved books and didn’t know a whole lot more about what to do about that. And Greenlight was a really incredible place to land for a little bit. I ended up briefly at Publishers Weekly, and then did a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.

And I was, broadly speaking, while I was there, […] researching literature and activism and the connection between those two things. Literature as activism, how literature, especially in the early 20th century, commented on some of the environmental activism of its time. And in my last four years at Columbia, I was there for about a decade in total, after I’d finished my degree, I started teaching a class that was basically the greatest hits of Western political philosophy. So starting with the Republic and then going all the way through Saidiya Hartman and Michel Foucault and so many modern classics.

And as I was teaching that class, I didn’t know it, but I was creating the intellectual foundation for what I would be doing now, which is understanding some of the philosophy of free expression and free speech that has informed the U.S. First Amendment, […] which in turn informs the basis for defending books from being attacked in court.

Libro.fm: What are the big boulders that we’re facing when it comes to how these book bans are going down today?

Philomena: Yeah, there’s so many ways to answer that question because unfortunately there are a ton of challenges, and there are a ton of mines in that minefield. One of the challenges is that some of the ‘grassroots’ [are] actually frequently quite well funded. A lot of the groups that have been trying to ban books […] got a jump on us really in 2021.

People were not used to paying attention to their school board because they were boring. School boards should be boring. It should be about allocation of resources. But because no one was paying attention, groups like Moms for Liberty were able to identify an opportunity to shut down books and ideas that they didn’t agree with, including COVID precautions. Actually, that’s a lot of where it started is with COVID precautions, and the fact that maybe they didn’t agree with or like some of the books that their kids had access to at school.

And so because they noticed this, they organized and frequently got their people on school boards before anyone could even notice. And to some extent, in the three years since then, everyone else has been playing catch up. People noticed all of a sudden that crazy things were happening at their school board. But it took time for them to find the other people who agreed with them and to organize against it. Once people get organized, very frequently they’re able to throw out the bad school board and replace it with people who want school boards to be functional and boring again. But that has been one of the challenges, is just playing catch up. Doing the fundraising, getting information to the people who need it and so forth. But there’s also a lot of clarity needed in some of the principles that determine who gets to decide which books are in which library.

Libro.fm: This is a big couple of days for you. A new The Right to Read handbook just came out, so tell us all about it.

Philomena: Yes, it’s called the ABA Right to Read Handbook: Fighting Book Bans and Why It Matters. And I essentially created this book because I needed it. I was looking for something to point booksellers to when their customers are coming in seeing their banned books displays and saying, “Well, what can I do about it?” And booksellers, they have their own local resources, but I really wanted them to have a book to point their customers to. I couldn’t quite find anything that had the combination of history and interviews and pragmatic, step-by-step, how-to guides that I wanted, and so I was like, “Well, that’s my work to do, I guess.”

And through all of this, it’s powered by booksellers. It’s powered by activists and other organizations that we work with. I mean, so much of this work that I’ve been doing over the past year—because it’s about a year that I’ve been at ABA—has just been me learning from booksellers and other activists who are doing the work. So the how-tos in many cases are things that have come from talking to people who are already doing the work. The interviews are all interviews I conducted over the course of the year, which is just forwarding the experience and wisdom of the people I talk to.

And the history part […] goes back to the McCarthy era […] back to the 19th century […] to show how all these different censorship cases have kind of been recurrences of the same fight. Have kind of been just different strategies to try to force this puritanical way of thinking about literature and culture onto everyone else. […] I didn’t want to just give people that history and say, “Well, we can all just sit around together feeling bad now.” I needed to also say, and here’s what you can do about it. Here’s some inspiring people who have figured out ways to fight back. And here is something for anyone, whatever point you’re at in terms of this advocacy, whether you’re new to it, whether you’re just worried about book bans showing up in your community, whether they’ve been there for years, I designed it hoping that it would have something for anyone no matter what point they were in that journey.

Listen to the full episode: 

About our guest

Philomena Polefrone is the Advocacy Associate Manager at the American Booksellers Association, where she champions intellectual freedom and free expression. With a background in bookselling and a decade in academia, Philomena brings a unique perspective to her work, blending literature and activism. She leads initiatives like the Set Books Free Project, aimed at combating book bans and promoting access to diverse, often censored literature. Her passion for defending the right to read makes her a key advocate in the fight against censorship.

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