And so I think that Out of Darkness is literature. it's not to be provocative or to distress anyone, but because when we want to write about human experience honestly and completely, we have to include the pain of being a person. And as a literature professor myself, I can tell you that literature from the Bible to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Faulkner deals with difficult topics because those aspects of life are the materials literature. Out of Darkness, like many works of literature, engages with all kinds of aspects of human experience. On writing about the human experience, even the hard parts The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. After many years on bookshelves, in 2021 this frank portrayal earned the book a spot on the American Library Association (ALA) Banned Book List for 'depictions of abuse and because it was considered to be sexually explicit.' The novel re-contextualizes contemporary issues of race, providing a historical framework in a not-so-post-racial America. The characters cross color lines and navigate familial tensions and traumas. This historical context is foregrounded by the fictional love story between an African American boy and a Mexican American girl. Out of Darkness is based on a true-events: In 1937, a natural gas explosion at a school in New London, Texas, killed nearly 300 students and teachers - one of the deadliest school disasters in U.S. She published Out of Darkness in 2015, a year that invoked a national conversation surrounding issues of race, environmental racism, racialized violence and police brutality. Pérez - who is a comparative literature professor at The Ohio State University in addition to having authored three novels - centers her writing on Latin American narratives, making space for young Latino readers to see themselves in her work. This discussion with Ashley Hope Pérez is part of a series of interviews with - and essays by - authors who are finding their books being challenged and banned in the U.S.Īshley Hope Pérez is the author of the award-winning Out of Darkness, a young adult novel that has faced challenges and bans in the U.S.

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