A Showcase of My Writing

Dedication: To Tamron Hall and her murder mystery, As the Wicked Watch. This story draws inspiration from your character-driven, emotionally charged plot and relatable, detailed slice-of-life events. Since you wrote stories based on your life, I did, too. My goal was to come across as conversational and to let the reader easily imagine what was happening. Your character, June Manning, made it possible for Kevin Richards and his friends to exist. I hope this story does your name and writing style justice.

Before this class, I was familiar with a few of the authors we discussed; however, my understanding was primarily surface-level, focusing on the bigger picture. Now, more than halfway through this semester, I’ve come to enjoy learning about specific ideologies and theories (especially from The Norton Anthology section) because it has fundamentally changed the way I approach reading, helping me to recognize the underlying historical, cultural, and theoretical frameworks that inform and critique literature. The two readings that expanded my insights into analyzing literary texts are The Shush by Kyla Wazana Tompkins and The Historical Text as Literary Artifact by Hayden White. Through these authors’ concepts, arguments, and the broader connections to my anchor text, I’ve learned that literary analysis is both a rhetorical construction, as White suggests, and a political act of reading, as Tompkins reveals how power and interpretation are always connected.

Across the United States, books are disappearing from school shelves, not because students aren’t reading them, but because adults fear what those books might inspire. In recent years, following the pandemic, the popularity of books has risen dramatically, driven by social media, influencers, and bookstores, resulting in record-breaking sales and vibrant online and in-person reading communities. However, this uprising has also caused significant tension with public schools and libraries that have removed certain books due to their subject matter. As debates intensify, the issue is no longer just about individual titles but about who decides what information students can access. The question everyone should be asking: Should public schools and libraries be allowed to ban books based on controversial content, or does this practice violate a student’s intellectual freedom and expression? While parents have the right to guide their own children’s reading, they do not have the right to restrict access for everyone else. With this in mind, public schools and libraries should not ban books based on content related to race, gender, or sexuality because such censorship undermines education, disproportionately targets marginalized authors, and prevents young people from critically engaging with the world.