No room for Freedom in Perry, Indiana. A veteran high school teacher in Perry, Indiana has been suspended without pay for teaching The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. The book by Long Beach, California teacher/author Erin Gruwell and her students is taught in classrooms around the world. It chronicles the remarkable educational journey made by one “unteachable” urban high school class when students are introduced to the diaries of fellow teenage writers Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic, and then begin powerful journals of their own lives. The journey became a book. The book became a major motion picture and a movement in education. (Learn more at the Freedom Writers Foundation.) But, the Perry Township School Board doesn’t care much about the student engagement generated by the book or its deep message of racial tolerance or even the fact that 149 of 150 parents approved its use in writing. What the school board cares about is that the book has dirty words (see it on CNN). The teacher, Connie Heerman, has been suspended for a year and a half. Read more in an essay by filmmaker Richard LaGravenese in the Huffington Post and at the LAT’s The Big Picture Blog. Make a donation to support Connie Heerman or the Freedom Writers Foundation here.

Beating the burn, twice. The Henry Miller Memorial Library, threatened since late June by the Basin Complex Fire in Big Sur, has had to evacuate its treasures twice. The location chosen for the June 22 evacuation of artwork, primary source material, and rare books was endangered by the progress of the fire and, on July 2, the collection had to moved again to a location in Carmel. The fire came to the doorstep of the library, but the library building and Henry Miller’s home have been spared so far. With the fire still very much alive, the library also had to cancel a benefit concert and the West Coast Poetry Slam Championship, originally scheduled for July 12 and 13. Learn more at the The Henry Miller Memorial Library news page or get fire news at the SurFire blog.

Getting to know No One You Know: Michelle Richmond, whose Year of Fog was a NYT bestseller, does a nice e-mail interview with Jeff VanderMeer of Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog. She discusses the writing life, genre-bending, and the ideas about story, fact, fiction, mystery and math that influence her new book — No One You Know, launched in June. Read the interview here. Check Richmond’s tour schedule at her website. It includes a July 13 gig on Backstage with Ben Fong-Torres, who appears as a character in No One. The show — which will include “songs about fog, memory, math, and coffee” — will air from 8-9 a.m. and from 8-9 p.m. on 106.9 KFRC in the Bay area. Or you can stream it from the KFRC site.

Barber turned bookseller, Reuben Martinez is profiled by CBS news as the “Stay-in-School Hero of Santa Ana.” See it here.

California Author T.C. Boyle has a new short story in the New Yorker. Read Thirteen Hundred Rats here.

Happy birthday to us! CaliforniaAuthors.com was launched in early July, 2002. Click here to learn more about our story.