Arif Qazi / Insider
- An Oklahoma teacher who helped students access banned books faced death threats.
- Summer Boismier left her teaching job and now works at the Brooklyn Public Library.
- The threats still rattle her, but she's more worried that teens and kids are losing access to books.
An Oklahoma teacher who said she lost her job after helping her students access banned books is speaking out against the growing movement to censor books in schools.
Summer Boismier used to work as a high school English teacher in Oklahoma.
In 2021, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law to limit student engagement with critical race theory, gender identity, and sexuality in the classroom.
As soon as the bill was passed, Boismier gave her students a QR code that led them to the Brooklyn Public Library's Books Unbanned project, which allows them to read the very books that their own school officials deemed not appropriate. Books that have been popularly challenged are often about or feature people of color, LGBT people, and people with disabilities, according to the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.
Boismier said she soon began receiving complaints, scary threats, and harassing messages across her social media platforms and emails.
"There've been countless individuals who've wanted me criminally charged, who've suggested at various points and times and comment sections across the internet," Boismier told Insider. "Individuals who've called for my prosecution and even my execution."
Some of them called for her sterilization, she said.
Boismier resigned from her teaching job and moved 1,500 miles away from her home to Brooklyn, New York, where she began working for the Brooklyn Public Library.
But the threats are still on her mind.
"They still rattle around in my brain and I feel like so often one rogue thought from utter disaster," she said.
Nowadays, Boismier still thinks of herself as a teacher — just one who instructs and educates outside of the classroom.
She's working with teens to help them combat book bans as part of a collaborative effort with PEN America called the Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute.
In this role, Boismier said she gets a front-row seat to how book bans continue to negatively affect teens.
"There's very much a desire amongst young people for connection and community," she said. "Those two things are very much things that can be experienced and contained through texts, through reading."
Books that help young readers feel a sense of belonging and community are being pulled from library and classroom shelves all over the country, she said.
Since last August, she's been experiencing "almost near constant panic attacks," she said. She has trouble sleeping through the night.
But Boismier said her own mental health challenges are no match for what teens across the country are facing.
"I think the struggle is greater for our young people walking into classrooms, seeing their stories removed from library shelves, from bookshelves and classrooms as well, and getting the message from some of the adults who are in positions to protect them, getting the message that their story stories don't matter, ergo their lives don't either," she said.
As threats come in, so do messages of support, love, and encouragement, Boismier said. Parents and grandparents and community members all over the US have reached out in support of her. Even former students of hers have been reaching out to thank her for her efforts.
But some students, in fearful messages and emails to Boismier, express a sense of hopelessness.
"They run along the lines of 'I don't know what to do,'" she said.
Since the Books Unbanned program first launched, thousands of people from all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have requested digital library cards to access the books, said Fritzi Bodenheimer, spokesperson for the Brooklyn Public Library.
That alone shows how much of a demand there is for legislators to stop censoring books, Boismier said.
"It should be raising countless alarm bells," she said.
"While our students should very much be at the center of this conversation and their voices should very much be the voices we're listening to, we need the adults in the room to do something," she said.