My introduction to book bans came as an undergraduate at Texas A&M during my junior year. I had taken a course on young adult literature, specifically about banned books. I was shocked to hear that books could be banned, especially in schools.

After graduating, I was accepted into Teach for America and was assigned to teach in the Rio Grande Valley, where I’d lived since middle school, as a 9th-grade English teacher in 2017. I was given Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running to teach as my students’ summer reading book. Just before classes were set to start, I was told that the book would no longer be in the curriculum. Students were not allowed to bring it to school and were not to discuss it in any form in class. For all intents and purposes, it had been banned. This was not the only time I would experience a ban during the school year, as Toni Morrison’s Beloved was taken out of the curriculum a few months later. I decided to return to pursue a graduate degree at the end of school year, driven by my experiences with book bans and an interest in doing further research.