PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
"Claudia Johnson is a nationally recognized advocate for free speech and social justice. In 1993, she was honored with the inaugural PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, presented by Paul Newman, for her ""extraordinary efforts to restore banned literary classics to Florida classrooms""--and again in the 2022 ""PEN America at 100: A Century of Defending the Written Word"" exhibition at the New York Historical Society. She also received the Giraffe Heroes Commendation awarded to people who stick their neck out for the common good. And she continues to fight book banning, recently helping reinstate banned books to Virginia Beach classrooms and libraries. Her second memoir, Hurtling Toward Happiness: A Mother and Teenage Son's Road Trip from Blues to Bonding in a Really Small Car, was praised by the New York Times for its ""quick pace and energetic dialogue that shows genuine warmth between mother and son."" Her screenwriting text, Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect--now in its fifth/Twentieth Anniversary edition--introduced the narrative theory that human connection is as essential as conflict in the stories we tell. Her civil rights documentary, The Other Side of Silence: The Untold Story of Ruby McCollum, was awarded the Gold Jury Prize at Seattle's Social Justice Film Festival and Best Florida Documentary at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. She is a member of the founding faculty of the FSU Film School and also taught screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. She has co-authored two books with her longtime writing partner, Matt Stevens--A Christmas Belle, a sequel to Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and Script Partners: How to Succeed at Co-Writing for Film & TV, now in its second edition. And their co-written screenplays have been optioned and named finalists in multiple competitions, including Final Draft's Big Break Screenwriting Contest and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab."
During 1986 in the small town of Lake City, Florida, textbooks used in the high school humanities class were confiscated and locked up by order of the school board. Chaucer's 'The Miller's Tale' and Aristophanes' Lysistrata, included in the textbook, were found to be offensive due to 'sexual explicitness.' Johnson, then a Ph.D. student in English literature at Florida State University and a resident of Lake City, vigorously opposed the banning of these works as well as the moral dictatorship of the administrators. She writes of the legal as well as personal trials she endured in her struggle to preserve the right of free speech in her community. Her court battles were unsuccessful, yet the experience of her five-year ordeal is edifying. Recommended for general collections. --Library Journal, Eloise R. Hitchcock, Tennessee Techno- logical Univ. Lib., Cookevill In 1986 school officials in Lake City, a town in north Florida, banned a state-approved high school textbook because it included Aristophanes's sexually frank Lysistrata and Chaucer's bawdy 'The Miller's Tale.' Johnson, a playwright and graudate student, decided to fight back, and her lively story captures the claustrophobic know-nothing spirit of the book burners. Though the students themselves were critical of the banning and Lake City was ridiculed by editorialists, the directive was upheld by a federal judge in 1988 and by an appeals court the next year. Johnson and her allies, advised by lawyers fearful of the Supreme Court's new conservative majority, did not further pursue the case. However, she joined a successful fight against an attempt to ban Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in another rural Florida town. Johnson's description of the toll her crusade took on her marriage might have been trimmed, but would-be activists will learn from her story that fights are stressful. --Publisher's Weekly The Florida book-banning battles have made Ms. Johnson a heroine of the anti-censorship movement...While her story offers a vivid lesson on the politics of censorship, the real appeal of Stifled Laughter is the joyful spirit with which she recounts the quotidian progress of her personal campaign against book banning. --The New York Times Book Review
Julian Assange
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Conspiracy Theory
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Silenced in the Library
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