Just months after Utah banned her novel “Nineteen Minutes” from all public schools, author Jodi Picoult is coming to the state Saturday.

Here, she will headline the first-ever Salt Lake Book Festival. The free all-day literary celebration takes place at The Gateway shopping center and features independent booksellers, artists and spaces for attendees to cozy up with their favorite novel.

“I like going places where my books are challenged, because I think that very often, the audiences there are hungry to hear a point of view like mine,” Picoult told The Salt Lake Tribune.

Her talk is ticketed, and it will be held offsite at nearby West High School’s auditorium starting at 6:30 p.m.

Picoult’s arrival comes after the state in January banned her 2007 New York Times bestseller about a school shooting in the fictional town of Sterling, New Hampshire. The story focuses on the aftermath and explores the motivations of the shooter, who was relentlessly bullied.

Before her event, Picoult spoke with The Tribune about Utah’s sensitive materials law, how she felt when she learned about the ban and why she’s still excited to be in Utah.

“Don’t invite me to Utah unless you want to play,” she said.

‘If I lived in Utah, I would be calling my reps’

Picoult is familiar with being a “banned author,” she said.

Throughout the U.S., “Nineteen Minutes” was the most commonly banned book during the 2023-24 school year, according to PEN America.

But in Utah, she said, “You guys went to the trouble of passing a law to keep my book off school shelves.”

That law requires a book to be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material” — content that meets the state’s definition of pornographic or otherwise indecent.

That includes depictions of intercourse, masturbation or the touching of a character’s genitals, as well as nudity, defined in state law as anything “less than completely and opaquely” covering human genitals, buttocks and female breasts “below a point immediately above the top of the areola.”

It also includes any depiction of “male genitals in a discernibly turgid state,” covered or not.

A book can meet those standards if it contains a single mention. Since the law took effect two years ago, 44 titles have been removed from classroom shelves statewide.

Once a book is pulled, Utah law requires that it must be destroyed. School dumpsters and garbage cans aren’t considered acceptable means of legal disposal, and donating, reselling or distributing sensitive materials isn’t allowed.

Under the strict guidance, the Salt Lake City School District, for instance, feeds all copies of banned tiles into a shredding machine that’s kept under lock and key.

The exact reason a book is banned in Utah is not always disclosed. But here and elsewhere, Picoult’s theory is it’s because “Nineteen Minutes” contains the word “erection” on one page.

“I find it very hard to believe that high school students don’t know what that is,” she said.

When she found out, Picoult said she was “furious.”

“If I lived in Utah,” she said, “I would be calling my reps, and I would be saying, ‘How dare you let this stand.’”

She added that “Nineteen Minutes” has won multiple awards, including New Hampshire’s 2009 Teen Reader’s Choice.

“And yet it is being said to be ‘harmful and pornographic’ and not applicable or appropriate for teens?” she said. “So, I would really like to know the rationale behind that.”

Book bans a ‘slippery slope,’ Picoult believes

Book ban proponents like Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, have argued the law is meant to protect children.

Ivory sponsored Utah’s sensitive materials law, and in September, he told The Tribune it directs schools to prioritize “protecting children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography” above all else.

But Picoult said she believes that is “an utter lie.”

Of the 44 titles banned from all Utah public schools, most were authored by women. Many grapple with topics like sexual abuse, identity, mental health and navigating girlhood.

Two books removed statewide are memoirs by sexual abuse survivors: “Lucky” by Alice Sebold, and “A Stolen Life: A Memoir” by Jaycee Dugard.

A 2025 study from the Utah State University Utah Women & Leadership Project (UWLP) found Utah rates of child sexual abuse are higher than national averages. One in seven Utah children experience sexual abuse before the age of 18. Nationally, that rate is one in nine.

For Utah girls and young women, the study found the rate is higher: one in five.

“What book banners do is just take resources that kids use to help them deal with a really complicated world and remove those resources from their hands,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is a very slippery slope.”