For my first article at a new Texas publication, The Barbed Wire, I interviewed nonbinary Texas author Jonny Garza Villa about their rapid rise to success as a writer of young adult romance, the importance of writing diverse stories for queer young folks, and the experienced of getting banned from speaking at a San Antonio school district:
“The most rewarding part of stories,” said author Jonny Garza Villa at a book signing hosted by Austin’s Little Gay Shop, is “realizing that I can write something that’s hyperspecific, a Mexican-American experience in a specific city in Texas, and how what that character is going through can relate to anyone, anywhere.”
Garza Villa’s young adult fiction is imbued with rich cultural details of Latiné Texas life, including the perhaps unlikely queer joy one can find here, despite the hostility that LGBTQ+ Texans face. One rising form of such hostility is book bans. Since 2021, Pen American found Texas has banned more than 1,500 books in public schools and libraries, many of which featured LGBTQ+ identities. In the U.S., only Florida has banned more books. And, as Garza Villa has experienced first-hand, that antipathy may be extending to authors.
Garza Villa had a rapid rise to success since they published their first book in 2021. “Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun” — about a long distance relationship that forms when a teen comes out on social media — was selected as a 2022 Pura Belpré Honor Book (named for the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library). In their second book, “Ander & Santi Were Here,” a nonbinary muralist falls for the newest waiter at their family’s taqueria; that novel won honors in the 2024 Stonewall Book Awards. They’ve got three books out now and a fourth (“Futbolista”) on the way in 2025.
In the midst of that churn — and the subsequent acclaim — in September 2023, a librarian offered Garza Villa a paid opportunity to lecture to students at Roosevelt High, part of San Antonio’s North East Independent School District, which has the distinction of having banned more books than any other district in Texas.
