Description
Powerful tales of resilience, from educators and librarians in the face of the growing bigotry stoked by the far right
“Heartbreaking yet hopeful, Pushed to the Edge is a powerful revelation of the war taking place against public school teachers and their students.” —JoAnne Tompkins, author of What Comes After
When the Proud Boys stormed a library near her former school to disrupt a Drag Story Hour, veteran public school teacher Sue Granzella responded. Drawing on more than thirty years in the classroom, she began traveling California and documenting the stories of fellow educators and librarians who have been harassed and threatened for teaching honestly about race, gender, immigration, religion, and sexuality. Many people would be surprised to hear that it’s happening in California, long considered the haven of liberals and the pinnacle of tolerance. Florida and Texas have been the canary-in-the-coalmine of nascent culture wars, but California is now the disaster siren, screaming a state of emergency.
Pushed to the Edge is a powerful and timely collection of first-person accounts from the front lines of today’s escalating culture wars. Cassandra, a young, queer woman of color and an award-winning teacher, was shattered by homophobia and viciously emboldened parents, and was ultimately forced to leave the job she’d dreamed of since kindergarten. In Temecula, educators mobilized their community to try to overthrow the majority-Christian nationalist school board determined to eliminate the teaching of Black history. There are Black educators, queer teachers, targeted librarians, and vulnerable students, all with stories to tell. While rooted in California, the book’s insights and urgency resonate nationwide—offering both a sobering view of what’s at stake in our schools and our libraries and a hopeful testament to those who refuse to back down.
Author Bio
Sue Granzella is a longtime public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in over forty journals and anthologies, including The Masters Review, Full Grown People, Hippocampus, and Ascent, and has been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays. She has won the Naomi Rodden Essay Award, a Memoirs Ink contest, multiple awards in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was runner-up for Teachers and Writers’ Bechtel Prize. Pushed to the Edge is her first book.
Praise
Praise for Pushed to the Edge:
“[An] eye-opening debut. . . . Taken together, these stories expose a culture of fear pervading public schools.”
—Publishers Weekly
“I found this to be a bittersweet—very bitter, very sweet—paean to the life of American teachers. There are few jobs more difficult or important, and yet our government, at every level, finds ways to make teaching less appealing. Sue Granzella has written a very gentle, very reasonable, and often upsetting account of how some very gentle, very reasonable, and justifiably upset teachers are handling this uniquely tough time in the history of American education. And though so much of what she reports is dire, these teachers, and their resilience, compassion, and craftiness, will give you hope in bleak times as they find ways to look out for their most vulnerable students.”
—Dave Eggers, founder of Scholar Match and co-founder of 826 National
“The spark for Sue Granzella’s Pushed to the Edge is seemingly simple: how, she wonders, are teachers and librarians affected by the culture wars in their own classrooms? To answer the question, Granzella hits the road, driving around California to talk to teachers on their own turf, bringing together first-rate storytelling and research as well as her own experiences in the classroom to take the pulse of this country right now. The result, this compelling, troubling, and insightful book, is anything but simple. It is a must-read for all educators, all parents, all Americans.”
—Lori Ostlund, author of Are You Happy?, After the Parade, and The Bigness of the World
