Kona Morris on Censorship

Editor's Note: Kona Morris is a much awarded storyteller and comic who has contributed her deep felt thoughts on censorship below on the eve of her 2026 NYC Fringe Festival performance. Morris lists her complete bio as follows---

"...Kona Morris is a storyteller, writer, and educator. She has won The Moth StorySLAM in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston, and she came in first place for the Ojai Storytelling Festival Story Slam, which was judged by Featured Tellers from the National Storytelling Festival. She has been featured on international television shows and podcasts, such as Stories From The Stage (PBS and the WORLD Channel) and the RISK! Podcast. Her episode on Stories From The Stage, entitled, “Getting Away With It,” won a 2025 Signal Award. Kona was a finalist for the J.J. Reneaux Emerging Artist Award, and she was selected to be one of the 2025 Stone Soup Storytelling Festival New Voices. She starred in Denver’s Live Drunk History Comedy Troupe, where she was Editor-in-Chief of Fast Forward Press, helped to run the F-Bomb Flash Fiction Reading Series, and spent 14 years teaching literature, mythology, and creative writing courses to college students. Kona's stories, articles, and prose poems have appeared in a variety of publications, and she has been featured at literary readings, writing conferences, storytelling events, and comedy shows around the world. Kona teaches storytelling craft workshops to inspire others to tell their stories...

Kona Morris on Censorship--

"Write Hard!

In English class my freshman year of high school, my teacher, Mr. Miller, sat at the front of the classroom and read us Catcher in the Rye because he was NOT ALLOWED TO ASSIGN IT.

After that first day, I was so furious at the system that would try to keep this from us, I left school and rode my bicycle to a local used bookstore and bought a weathered paperback, which I read the entirety of that weekend. Holden Caulfield’s cynicism and rebellion was one of the most authentic narrative voices I had heard in my 14 years of life, and it made me feel less alone.

It was the start of a lifetime love of literature that pushes boundaries. Of reading hard truths, especially the ones that make us uncomfortable.

In my senior year of college, I debated about the value of Nabokov’s Lolita. A woman in class argued that we shouldn’t read it because of the disturbing desires of the main character. But banishing people who have been psychologically stunted doesn’t help anyone heal! Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. Facing it is the only path to understanding.

Mark Twain said we don’t always have to write about our experiences, but we should write from a place of experience. It needs to feel real. And our emotional range is vast. If we censor what we are allowed to read and write, then we will be left with a filtered and phony simulation of the human experience. And that is not going to inspire anyone.

We have to be able to face and feel it all, from the pangs of Sylvia Plath’s suicide to the heathen eroticism of Djuna Barnes. From morbid to melancholy and back again. That’s how we can know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Otherwise, we are living in a manufactured bubble and ignoring the multitudes that make our life experience unique.