Charlotte Director Apologizes
for Risqué Reading
A raunchy book excerpt read by an author at the Novello Festival of Reading October 16 prompted an apology from Public Library of Charlotte (N.C.) and Mecklenburg County Director Robert Cannon. Several audience members and their children walked out of the theatre where Jim Grimsley was reading from his book Boulevard, which includes references to homosexual sex and items in an adult bookstore. The library has sponsored the annual two-week festival since 1991.
Cannon said in the October 23 Charlotte Observer that the library should have warned the audience of 450 about the explicit content. “We made a mistake,” he said in response to a complaint letter from attendee Courtney Ward. “We didn’t know that he was going to read those particular passages.”
Ward said in her letter, “I do not believe in banning books, but I do believe some books ought to be left to the individual whether to read or not.”
Grimsley, a playwright and novelist who is director of Emory University’s Creative Writing Program, said he wouldn’t want to speak in a place where his work requires a warning label. “This is the world their children are going to grow up in,” he told reporters. “They’re going to hear dirty language. They’re going to hear about sex.”
Posted October 28, 2002.
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