Dear Bully: Nancy Garden *Guest Post*

With the release of Dear Bully on September 5th, we are celebrating it's release and message here at BNR. From Sept. 4th to Sept. 14th, we will be having authors that contributed to DB on the blog.


Today on the blog is Nancy Garden, author of "Annie on My Mind":

A versatile writer, Nancy Garden has published books for children as well as for teens, nonfiction as well as fiction. But her novel Annie on My Mind, the story of two high school girls who fall in love with each other, has brought her more attention than she wanted when it was burned in front of the Kansas City School Board building in 1993 and banned from school library shelves in Olathe, Kansas, as well as other school districts. A group of high school students and their parents in Olathe had to sue the school board in federal district court in order to get the book back on the library shelves. Today the book is as controversial as ever, in spite of its being viewed by many as one of the most important books written for teens in the past forty years. In 2003 the American Library Association gave the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Nancy Garden for lifetime achievement.

Nancy's Guest Post

Now that I've read my colleagues' stories in Dear Bully I'm struck by what a large and potentially strong underground sister- and brotherhood of bullying victims, bullies, and bystanders we form! I am struck even more by the probability that our remembered pain is shared by thousands of other adults, most of whom, like most of us, have kept silent about the fear, the humiliation, the guilt, and the agony they suffered years ago, and the ache we all carry in our hearts for the kids who now find themselves spinning in the same vicious circle. And I ask myself and all other adults: Can't we now at last try to end this scourge by speaking out and by teaching and demonstrating that all kids are valuable and have a right to be "different" whatever that difference is? Can't we now, in our own homes and neighborhoods and schools and houses of worship make the effort to acknowledge that bullying is ubiquitous, that childhood bullying kills and wounds permanently? Can't we also begin to acknowledge that childhood bullying that goes untreated can lead to extreme horrors like school shootings, adult bullying, and torture?

Please--let us at least try!

Where you can find Nancy:

Website l Goodreads l Facebook

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I want to thank Nancy and all of the other authors who jumped on board with this event! It has been incredible to get to know reasons why authors got involved with this project and their views on bullying. I hope that Dear Bully is an inspiration to those everywhere and can start a new revolution of peace.

You can order Dear Bully on Amazon and click here to view the website.

Peace and Fangs,
Alisha