You may know Lauren Groff as the New York Times best-selling author of Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021), and other titles, but writing exquisite fiction is not the only way Groff contributes to the literary community. In early 2023, Groff was living in Germany on a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin when she first heard about the tsunami of book bans and challenges happening in the state of Florida, which were due to the convergence of conservative advocacy groups and state legislation. Germans kept telling her how important it was to stop that sort of censorship immediately. Groff says, “They know what happens if we allow these things to continue: It’s the beginning of an authoritarian avalanche. The nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine said, ‘In the places where books are burned, one day people will burn people.’ Of course, a century later, the Nazis burned Heine’s books, among many others, and we all know how that turned out.” Groff decided she needed to take action.
Back in the States, in April 2024 she opened an independent bookstore called The Lynx in Gainesville, Florida, where she lives. With a range of author events that focus on banned books and Florida writers, The Lynx provides a safe, inclusive place for the community to gather. But Groff didn’t stop there. She wanted to create literary events that would challenge the status quo. She wanted to give away heaps of banned books. She realized a for-profit bookstore would have difficulty supporting these activities. So in May, Groff created an extension of her store by launching a nonprofit organization, the Lynx Watch. Every penny the Lynx Watch receives goes to providing antiauthoritarian programming or to distributing books banned or challenged in the state of Florida, which has the highest number of public school and library book bans in the country.
Despite an August 2023 poll conducted by Ipsos that found fewer than ten percent of parents believe a book should be banned based on a challenge by just one parent, conservative advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty persist in challenging books that conflict with their conservative values. They work to remove any books that teach critical race theory, feature LGBTQI+ individuals, or refer to gender and sexuality.
In response to these and other threats, the Lynx Watch, composed of Groff and a board, reaches out to other organizations that align with its mission. In June the Lynx Watch helped the Gainesville Pride Center fill its library by donating hundreds of books. In August the group gave out over five hundred banned books at a back-to-school event hosted by Southwest Advocacy Group of Gainesville. The Lynx Watch is currently working with Gainesville Books to Prisoners to identify which books to donate as part of a large, upcoming gift. And the group is working with Lauren Poe, the former mayor of Gainesville, to get banned and challenged books into the hands of families seeking asylum in the United States who are being resettled in Gainesville.
Not only has the Florida Legislature banned any mention of sexuality or gender in schools, but it also has deleted almost all references to climate change in state law. The Lynx Watch is confronting this erasure as well. In September the organization hosted a Gainesville Reads program with a series of events, predicated on The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (Little, Brown, 2023) by environmental journalist Jeff Goodell. There were art events, educational lectures, book club meetings, and a talk by the author at Headquarters Library. “The urgencies of dealing with climate change are inextricable from other social urgencies,” Groff says. “Climate change denial is the censorship of science, the way that book bans are the censorship of LGBTQI+ people, Black and brown and Indigenous history, and ideas that challenge white supremacy.”
Groff also sees in book challenges a secondary risk: distraction from other urgent threats to civil liberties. “Although book banning and burning is truly egregious and the way that all modern genocides have begun, the people doing the book banning are actually doing it to draw our attention away from the other ways they are stripping us of our freedoms—our freedom to bodily autonomy, our freedom to live with a healthy environment, our freedom to feel safe and secure in our country.” Groff believes if those doing the book bans truly wanted to protect children, they would work to ban guns, which kill children every single day.
Author Emma Straub, who owns Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York, is helping raise funds for the Lynx Watch. “I think some of us in blue states feel a false sense of security when it comes to book bans, or that we can’t do anything to help,” Straub says. “So we at Books Are Magic are trying to both sound the alarm and funnel dollars to places where crucial help is needed. Author to author, bookseller to bookseller, I am so glad to have Lauren on my side of the fight.”
Groff invites readers to contact her at her bookstore if they have an idea to help or a partnership to offer. “There’s a pun in the name The Lynx,” she says. “We want to be the link between communities, to draw disparate people together in common cause, and the stronger the net we create, the more people we can help.”
Brenda Ferber is an award-winning children’s book author and a nonfiction writer for adults. Her website is brendaferber.com.
