Roebling Books in Covington held an event on Saturday to promote the freedom of information within their community during Banned Books Week, which ran from Oct. 1-7.
“[This event] is in celebration of the reading of books and fighting censorship, especially pointing out the fact that most banned books are banned because they speak to marginalized voices and communities,” said Syd Kleinholz, a Roebling Books employee.
Kleinholz said that banning books containing critical race theory, LGBTQ+ narratives, and themes that have been deemed by some parents to be sexually graphic or violent in nature is “another form of oppression.”
As a privately owned bookstore, Kleinholz said Roebling doesn’t experience many of the bans firsthand.
“The frontlines of the book bans are public schools and public libraries,” said Kleinholz.
The hope, Kleinholz said, is that events like these can foster community awareness.
“Over the last several years, they have been doing more and more community events and more things related to activism,” said patron Jamie Maier. “It’s definitely something I wanted to support.”
The bookstore hosts several events that aim to integrate various art forms, strengthen the local community and create cultural conversation, according to the bookstore’s website. A calendar of their events can be found here.
“This is definitely something to support,” said fellow patron Cat Rider. Rider purchased “Post Colonial Love Poem” by Natalie Diaz, a book that details the speaker’s endurance of traumatic and violent experiences in the United States as an indigenous woman.
“It was very powerful,” Rider said of the first few poems.
In addition to the books and merchandise Roebling was selling, the event featured art vendors, political campaigners and independent publishers. Avery Plummer, the creator of Nympho magazine, spoke about the problems publishers face regarding book-banning.
“Nympho is a queer-sex positive magazine that I made initially as my thesis project for my masters program at Ohio University, but it gained a lot of traction and became a community-building mechanism,” Plummer said.
“It’s meant to celebrate the queer community in its many different forms and also discuss some of the issues facing the community, facing marginalized voices,” Plummer said.
