What is Anger & Clarity?
If you’re here, you’ve probably found my Book-Loving Texan’s Guides to Texas school board elections. In those guides, I provide intel on pro-censorship and anti-diversity school board candidates aligned with groups like Moms for Liberty, and I provide resources and ways to connect with groups on the ground fighting those efforts.
But you probably don’t know why I care enough to spend hours of my life tracking book-banners and working to keep them out of office.
I’ve been writing publicly now for about ten years, and in that time a handful of issues have animated my work: LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, and free intellectual inquiry. What do those issues have in common? Well, they connect with the core of who I am. I’m a teacher in a school where most of our students are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, I’m a literary scholar, and I’m a father and husband with loved ones in the LGBTQ community.
“It is never inspiration that drives you tell a story,” says Valeria Luiselli, “but rather a combination of anger and clarity.” Book bans hit right at the things I know most about, the things where I have clarity: books, teaching, my students, my family. And those attacks make me angry.
This is a place for me to put that anger and clarity to work: to track, analyze, and strategize against attacks on intellectual freedom and inclusive classrooms. And to reflect, because the stakes and implications of these fights aren’t always obvious in the moment.
Who am I?
I’m Frank Strong, a teacher in Austin, Texas. I studied English and Spanish Literature in college, then taught both subjects in a Houston high school for five years before going on to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature. If you want to nerd out, my specific area of interest was the meaning of music in Cuban and African-American novels from the beginning and middle of the 20th Century. (Send me an email if you want to chat about Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy, James Weldon Johnson or Ralph Ellison.)
You can find some of my academic writing at the Latin American Literary Review and the E3W Review of Books. And you can read more of my writing on literature at The Millions, Ploughshares.org, and World Literature Today, among other places.
Now I’m teaching English and Journalism at a charter high school. And I have a daughter in an Austin ISD middle school.
Why should you subscribe?
In 2022 my writing started to get out in the world and—in a small way—helped build resistance against the tide of book bans and curriculum restrictions currently endangering Texas schools.
After the disappointing school board elections in May, I wrote an analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what steps to take moving forward. That piece was shared by leaders of Mothers Against Greg Abbott and Blue Action Dems, and I spent all summer and fall working with a variety of groups to help make sure the trend would reverse in November. And it did! Seven of eight Texas school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty lost their races on 11/8.
In July, the Corpus Christi branch of the American Federation of Teachers led a protest against Moms for Liberty and County Citizens Defending Freedom after I reported that those groups were holding a training session to teach rightwing activists to surveil teachers’ social media accounts.
I wrote an exposé, called a “must read” by Kelly Jensen at BookRiot.com, on book challenges in Conroe ISD, revealing the ways “parents’ rights” groups, local media, and politicians worked together to manufacture controversy in a district where parents had previously been pleased with the materials in their children’s schools.
And school board candidates in Tomball were forced to spend the waning days of their campaigns addressing their alarmism about “porn” in schools after parents in the district circulated my investigation into the political motivations behind their attacks on teachers and librarians.
The fight against censorship in the classroom will be just as intense in 2023 and beyond. And I’ll be in the trenches of that fight in Texas.
This isn’t the kind of newsletter that will go out every single week. I have a full-time job and some of my essays and investigations take weeks. But subscribers will get updates as often as I can put them out: deep dives into district races, interviews with people affected by book bans, and essays exploring the meaning of the events and movements that are shaping our schools.
What do you get with a paid subscription?
90% of what I write here will be free and available to all subscribers.
That said, this writing takes time and is often a lot of work. I do it because I think it has value. If you agree and are in a position to afford it, I would appreciate you upgrading to a paid subscription.
If you do, you’ll get access to a monthly book study—an introduction from me to a book that connects to the conversations of the moment—as well as a chance to discuss the book with other community members in the newsletter’s forums. The first book on the agenda is Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Read Until You Understand.
Thank you so much for being here, and please reach out if you have comments, questions, or something you want me to cover.
