Yes, The Poet X Is Banned!

Elizabeth Acevedo’s Carnegie Medal and National Book Award-winning novel-in-verse follows Xiomara Batista, a fifteen-year-old Dominican American girl in Harlem whose body draws unwanted attention from men on the street and disapproval from her deeply religious mother. Xiomara channels her anger, desire, and doubt into a notebook of poems and eventually into the school’s slam poetry club, a space her mother would forbid if she knew about it. Acevedo, herself a slam poet, writes with rhythmic precision, and the novel reads like a performance: urgent, physical, and impossible to set aside.

The Poet X was challenged 10 times in the 2024-2025 PEN America data, with bans across Florida and Tennessee school districts. The challenges cite sexual content, religious themes, and language. The book’s portrayal of Xiomara questioning her Catholic faith while exploring her sexuality draws objections from both angles. Acevedo has spoken about writing The Poet X for the girls she grew up with, Dominican and Afro-Latina teens whose experiences are rarely centered in literature. The book has won essentially every major award in YA publishing, and it continues to be pulled from shelves. The contradiction between institutional acclaim and institutional censorship is by now a familiar pattern.