Editor's note: Today for Banned Books Week, some of Open Road's fiction writers weigh in on their favorite banned or challenged books.
"When I was twelve, I memorized a poem for English class: Walt Whitman’s “This Dust Was Once The Man.” I chose it because Whitman was the “good gray poet” and I a good green girl, because he wrote it when Lincoln was shot and it was a hundred years later and Kennedy was shot. I chose it because it was four lines.
When I was sixteen, I was a pent-up aching river with a body electric that wanted ...