On Saturday, January 17th, 2026 at 6 p.m., Cavalier House Books (located at the heart of the Denham Springs Antique Village) hosted “The Librarians Doc. Watch Party,” an event that seeks to spread awareness on the subject of literary censorship, political propaganda, and the real experiences of people speaking out for what they believe is right in modern day America.
The event centered on a screening of the award-winning documentary The Librarians before its mass release. Amanda Jones, a local Louisiana librarian and bestselling author, was in attendance for the showing to answer questions about the film as well as discuss her role and experiences in advocating for literary freedom.
Amanda Jones
Amanda Jones has worked in the education field for over twenty-three years and during that time she has “served as president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians (LASL) and won numerous awards for her work in school libraries, including School Library Journal Librarian of the Year” in 2020.
According to the Louisiana Library Association, the Librarian of the Year award is presented to librarians who “demonstrated outstanding work and dedication to the mission and goals of the library profession within the state of Louisiana.”
Jones also contributed towards several online informational resources, such as the short video series “Journey with Jones” on the Livingston Parish Library YouTube channel which takes viewers on virtual trips around the globe to explore different habitats and their various wildlife.
But despite Jones’s many contributions and years of dedicated service, she had yet to face the greatest trial of her professional and personal life.
Back in the fall of 2021, a list of 850 books was submitted to Texas school superintendents by Texas Representative Matt Krause. Krause’s list wasn’t a To-Be-Read organizer or a bestseller wishlist, it was instead a call for the restriction of books that dealt with concepts of race, gender, sexuality, and historical tragedies such as the Holocaust. Krause sent out this list to Texan schools and demanded information regarding where the books were located in the districts, who had access to the books, and how much money was spent on the books while, at the same time, ordering their removal from Texan libraries.
So, when similar talk began in Louisiana regarding book banning, Amanda Jones took a stand at the local library board meeting in the summer of 2022 to speak out against censorship in schools and libraries. Jones’s statement was simple: books with diverse perspectives do not deserve to be purged from library shelves.
Jones was only “one of almost thirty speakers who registered their concerns about possible censorship and book banning” at that meeting in July 2022.
Despite that, it didn’t take long before Jones started to be harassed, slandered, and threatened on social media for purportedly “fighting hard to ‘keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section’ of our public library.”
Jones’s novel, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, opens the first chapter with an excerpt of one of the death threats she received during this time which read “you can’t hide. We know where you work + live… you have a LARGE target on your back… see you soon…”
“People were making so many assumptions about me,” Jones wrote in the same chapter. “According to them, I was some type of deranged miscreant who needed to be kept away from children. I have devoted twenty-two years of my life to the children of our community… [but] at that moment those twenty-two years didn’t seem to matter to anyone.”
In response to the slander, Jones decided she needed to step up and fight for what she believed in since the people who are seeking to disregard the First Amendment right to free press did not want to step down.
In her mission to protect libraries, Jones went on to co-found the Livingston Parish Library Alliance and was one of the founding members of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship.
Each of these organization’s mission statements state that they are committed to fighting against politically driven misinformation and predatory legislation in order to preserve the literary and educational freedoms of all Louisiana citizens.
To further that very same goal and provide accounts of her own experiences with this ongoing battle, Jones also appeared in the documentary The Librarians.
The Librarians
The Librarians had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2025 and was later released in the U.S. in October of the same year. The hour-and-a-half documentary is a runner-up for the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival's “Audience Choice, Documentary” award and has won over 20 awards with 16 nominations at several other film festivals.
The Librarians is a documentary that focuses on the “unprecedented wave of book banning” happening in schools and libraries across the U.S. that caused librarians from Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey to have to band together in the cause of “fighting for the intellectual freedom” of citizens and students everywhere.
The documentary features the testimonies, life experiences, and compiled evidence of several librarians who have stood on the front lines of the fight against book banning in America. Several librarians in the documentary, including Amanda Jones, were interviewed to discuss how standing up against these book bans and calls for books to be removed cost them their jobs, their friends, their safety, and for some, even their family ties.
In between the testimonies, the documentary highlights quotes from popular books pertaining to the subject of book censorship, such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and showcases some of the books that are being banned across the country, including Lawn Boy, And Tango Makes Three, and Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.
To give further insight into the nature of these bans, And Tango Makes Three, a short illustrated children’s book, was banned for having a male penguin couple that adopts and raises a chick together. This book is based on a true account of a male penguin couple from New York’s Central Park Zoo who successfully hatched and raised a chick with the help of zoo staff. However, since it had “LGBT+ themes,” the book was restricted and considered inappropriate for schools and libraries.
Jones went on to say, after the documentary screening finished, that “I will tell you, flat out, right now, there is no pornography or explicit material in any school library in Livingston Parish, nor is it found in any children’s section of the public library.”
Jones went on to discuss that, in 2024, Louisiana State Representative Kellee Hennessey Dickerson tried and failed to pass HB777, nicknamed the Amanda Jones Appeal, which, “would have put librarians in prison for two years of hard labor for attending an American Library Association Conference.”
“If citizens do not continue to spread the word and push back against these false claims, legislation such as this will only continue to be propagated by organizations and individuals who seek to make schools and libraries their next battle ground in a fight for religious or political ideology,” Jones said. “By banning literature that goes against a set religious or racial narrative that organizations such as Citizens for New Louisiana, Livingston Rising PAC, and Moms for Liberty deem as “correct,” these organizations seek to destroy not only their own potential to come to understand views different than their own but also obliterate any possibility for other individuals to explore and challenge their own worldviews and ideas.”
Jones invited the group who attended the watch party to also attend the next Library Board of Control meeting, which will be held January 20th at 6:00 p.m. at the main library branch in the Town of Livingston. The meeting will involve another book being challenged for removal, This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, which has won over 13 awards, including a Caldecott Honor and an Eisner Award. Supporters attending the meeting are encouraged to wear purple in solidarity to the cause.
