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Yancey County, population 18,000, is aggressively charming. Cows and horses dot the hills that flank the main road of Burnsville, the county seat. A church, a few shops, a coffee house, and an inn surround the town green.
Atop a hill a few blocks north of downtown, the front porch of the Yancey County Public Library is scattered with rocking chairs. The library’s small staff know their regulars by name, as well as their reading interests and favorite authors.
In the summer of 2023, Yancey County’s librarians noticed something strange: Certain books could not be found in their Dewey decimal-designated location. A quick hunt would locate the book in question on another shelf, facing backward, or wedged behind other materials. Of course, books can be accidentally misshelved. But this was no mistake.
Head librarian Wayne Edwards knew exactly what was happening: Hide the Pride had arrived in Burnsville.
Anti-gay activists had launched the Hide the Pride campaign a few years earlier. It’s a national effort encouraging people to disappear LGBTQ materials in public libraries during Pride Month so others cannot borrow them. In Burnsville, participants carried the crusade well beyond June. Edwards said they were still finding LGBTQ books hidden throughout the library for the next year.
Yancey County librarians were also getting phone calls and emails that called them “groomers.” They were accused of exposing children to pornography, even though they’d repeatedly explained their obscenity policy and which books are shelved as Adult versus Young Adult. One day they found a sticky note on the Pride display calling it “filth.” Another day, a patron accused the staff of harming children, and claimed the LGBTQ flag on the “Everyone is welcome here” sign decorating their Pride display was a “pedophile” flag, Edwards said.
Librarians also noticed that five people who weren’t regular patrons had borrowed an unusually large number of books on LGBTQ subjects—another Hide the Pride tactic. “It really made me sad,” said Edwards, who has worked at the branch for seven years. “Mostly because they were trying to hide things from people who might need them, and doing it out of some misguided sense of morality.”
Librarians quickly learned these disturbances weren’t just a short-term tactic to disrupt one month. They were shots across the bow.
Burnsville’s library is one of four branches in the AMY Regional Library System, which covers Avery, Mitchell, and Yancey counties. It’s one of 12 regional library systems across the state. Each branch receives some funding from their respective municipalities, but they share state funding, a director, a bookmobile, an outreach librarian and van, a children’s librarian, a digital literacy librarian, and technology resources. Each county has its own local library board and a regional library board includes members from them all. The system has operated like this since 1961, and in 2021, Yancey renewed its contract for another decade.
But one year after Hide the Pride came to town, the Yancey County Commission voted unanimously to remove its branch from AMY and operate independently. The move gave the county a year to separate itself from the regional system, with a deadline of July 1, 2025.
Yancey commissioners say they want the library to operate as an independent entity; Chair Jeff Whitson told The Assembly that the county wants it to be “sovereign.” But critics are dubious of the math: How can the county budget fund a library with the same level of services after cutting itself off from the shared parts of the regional system? And what materials, events, and displays will be welcome at the library—and which will not?
Shelved
Yancey County Public Library’s collection doesn’t appear to have an ideological slant. There are books by Henry Kissinger cataloged in the same section as Elizabeth Warren. Gender: Your Guide is on the same social sciences shelf as a book by Ann Coulter.
According to The Assembly’s informal survey, there were roughly 30 nonfiction books about gender and sexuality available on Yancey’s shelves or through the online intralibrary loan catalog NC Cardinal. As of last month, these ranged from Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, the 2019 autobiographical graphic novel memoir by an author who identifies as nonbinary; to What’s Happening to My Body: Books for Boys in the health section; to Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Steelworkers, an oral history by UNC Press. A handful are for young adults. The books for younger kids are primarily about topics like families with two dads, Edwards explained.
Each branch strives to provide materials that meet the needs of its patrons. And for nearly a decade, all four AMY branches assembled Pride Month displays. While there have been complaints in other counties in the past, AMY Director Amber Westall Briggs said she was able to alleviate concerns after speaking with local leaders. Additionally, branch’s obscenity guidelines are posted on its website.
Briggs said librarians use a concept called “mirrors and windows,” which is the idea that children should “have a mirror in which the book reflects themselves, so that they see themselves and their family and their community, and then also a window so they can see a completely different cultural experience.”
“Our collections represent the community that we are a part of, but they also have to be diversified to represent a larger world,” Briggs explained. “That’s what a library is.”
Libraries across the country are confronting opposition to LGBTQ books. “Advocacy groups who have sought to ban books from libraries have used social media harassment, harassment at board meetings, verbal harassment, and taking over library boards so they can fire a director who followed policy and retain[ed] books,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Foundation. “[They are] creating an atmosphere of harassment and intimidation.”
According to the ALA, 228 titles were challenged across North Carolina in 2023. That resulted in 63 titles being banned, and another three getting moved to a different section of the library. North Carolina had 103 titles challenged in 2024, resulting in 10 bans and one relocation. Books with racial or LGBTQ themes are challenged the most often, Caldwell-Stone said. In North Carolina, the two most-frequently challenged books are Looking For Alaska by John Green and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
Many in Yancey see a resident named Sheila Poehler as the catalyst behind the Yancey County Public Library uproar. On the day the Pride display debuted in June 2023, she telephoned Edwards to share her discomfort that the rainbow flag would attract children to the books on display.
Poehler mentioned two books depicted in a photo of the display on Facebook, Edwards said. He suspected social media is how she became aware of it. He listened to her concerns, explained the system’s procedure for patron objections and emailed her the link to their materials reconsideration form. Instead, Poehler contacted library director Briggs—Edwards’ boss—about the Pride display. Briggs described their phone call as tense; she sensed Poehler wanted her to capitulate by offering to take it down, but Briggs didn’t. She, too, advised Poehler to fill out a materials reconsideration form. Eventually, Poehler said that she would contact Briggs’ boss. (Briggs answers to the regional library board and does not have a direct manager.)
The AMY regional library system has received a handful of reconsideration requests over Briggs’ decade there, she said. However, it’s more common that people take their complaints to social media or just send emails. (For example, that same month, another Yancey County resident emailed to complain about Gender Queer, writing, “The blaten [sic] advertisement of this material despite its graphic nature makes me question if there are other such material [sic] in the library that a young child might come across.”) Per library policy, filling out a reconsideration request triggers review.
“Our collections represent the community that we are a part of, but they also have to be diversified to represent a larger world. That’s what a library is.”
Amber Westall Briggs, AMY director
After Poehler’s calls, she wrote to the main library address, according to emails obtained by public records request. Edwards and Briggs “refused to review or remove” the books on the Pride display, she wrote. “I have contacted the County Commissioner and hopefully this will be resolved.”
Later in June, county commissioners made the first movement to take direct control of the library branch. Whitson introduced a motion allowing County Manager Lynn Austin to research the process of “taking control of the current library system,” and making it “an operation showing no bias to any religious, political or ethnic platform.” This motion came as a surprise to Briggs—she had spoken with Whitson over the previous year about Pride displays and he’d “seemed satisfied by my answer,” she said.
Another commissioner suggested tabling the motion for a month to research the matter further, so Whitson withdrew it. Poehler spoke during public comment; meeting minutes note that she talked about “books she encountered” at the library and “her conversation with the regional director Amber Briggs.” (When reached by phone on April 14, Poehler said, “We’ve been very open. We’ve been very honest.” She declined further comment.)
The following month, resident Evan Stern emailed Austin and the commission about the library. He copied the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. “The local library has infringed upon my ability and the ability of others in our county to practice our faith in public spaces by supplanting their collection of literature with grotesque books that include graphic scenes of sodomy, ‘strap-on’ sex, lesbianism, and more depraved acts which are contrary to nature, abominable to God and alien to the Christian faith,” he wrote. (He declined to comment for this story.)
“Your email was received and read earlier this week,” Austin responded three days later. “We appreciate your input.” (Austin declined to comment for this story.)
‘Indoctrinate Our Youth With Disturbed Ideologies’
The commission’s attempt to remake the Yancey County branch started with the library board.
In 2023, the local board, which advocates for and promotes the library, was made up of seven members from Yancey County. Whitson described the library board as “out of control for decades” during a September 2023 meeting.
At that meeting, the commission added two seats to the local board, and appointed seven new members, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported. They included Poehler, Yancey County Commissioner Stacey McEntyre-Greene, and Michele Presnell, a Republican former state legislator who had cosponsored the so-called bathroom bill in 2016. The library board also had a new chair, Christy Edwards, a former art teacher. (There is no relation between Wayne Edwards the librarian and Christy Edwards.)
“The local library has infringed upon my ability and the ability of others in our county to practice our faith in public spaces by supplanting their collection of literature with grotesque books…”
Evan Stern, Burnsville resident
The new board frequently contacted Briggs, Whitson, and Austin. That’s how one day last year, Briggs found herself writing an unusual email: defending the right of a book club for adults to read a novel of their choice. Poehler and Whitson both wrote emails about Ales & Tales, a club that meets at a local brewery but that advertised on YCPL’s Facebook page. They worried its choice, Lawn Boy, by Jonathan Evison, a coming-of-age novel about a 20-something Latino/indigenous man, depicted pedophilia or pornography. (The book “talks often and in some detail” about an act of oral sex between the protagonist and another boy that happened when they were 10 years old, according to Common Sense Media.)
The library doesn’t even have a copy of Lawn Boy, Briggs responded. It’s also cataloged as adult fiction by the Library of Congress, not young adult fiction. “The book club Ales & Tales is a program for adult readers who can choose what book they want to read and discuss,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, a group called the NC Alliance of Families produced a “Yancey Library Report” about books it found objectionable in the library collection. The group describes itself as a political action committee dedicated to the protection of children and the preservation of parental rights. Lawn Boy and Gender Queer both made their report; however, it mistakenly depicted a different book, also named Lawn Boy, by Gary Paulsen, which is for young adults.
In a September 2023 email, John Mulvaney, director of NC Alliance of Families, emailed the commission about a book that actually is on the library’s shelves: the young adult nonfiction This Book is Gay. Mulvaney’s email, entitled “AMY Library Grooming Our Children,” complained that the book was pictured on social media. “In a defiant posture, the Yancey County Library has refused to relent in their promotion of materials that they intend for children,” Mulvaney wrote. He warned that the AMY regional system “is relentless in its endeavor to indoctrinate our youth with disturbed ideologies. … We need your help!” (Mulvaney did not respond to requests for comment.)
The library posts pictures of displays and items on its new acquisitions shelf, said Wayne Edwards. (He has not been able to post any pictures of displays on social media after the regional library board voted to change the regulations in 2024.)
Some library board members complained to Briggs, Whitson, and Austin about broader concerns. “I know a lot of families that don’t even go to the library anymore because the climate of books that are on display go against everything they stand for,” library board chair Christy Edwards wrote. “I feel like the new books that are being bought right now are on purpose because the majority of our board stand on family, patriotic and neutral standards.”
“Some are feeling now that our library is becoming less of the neutral sanctuary of yesteryear and more so a possible staging ground for some type of activist network,” Christie Byrd, another new local library board member, wrote in May 2024. She also questioned why the board did not vet book purchases. “Board members do not select books,” Briggs wrote. “I realize you feel a lack of control over what books are in public libraries.” (Byrd also did not respond to requests for comment.)
Hanging an American flag inside the library was also high on the priority list for the new board. Yancey County Public Library already has a flag on a pole on its front lawn, but a group had donated another large flag to display indoors. Staff said they didn’t have large enough indoor wall space for its size. “To put [the flag] inside would have been dragging it on the floor, which is disrespectful,” said Briggs.
But repeated emails to Briggs had an accusatory tone, including when board members decided to acquire a new indoor flag themselves rather than wait for Briggs to acquire an appropriately sized one.
Board chair Christy Edwards, meanwhile, texted her own complaints to another local official: “I am trying to get an American Flag with a stand in our lobby of the Yancey County Library because there is not one but we sure can hang up a Pride flag in June.”
A Key Decision
All this led up to the real decision, which came last summer.
AMY Director Briggs was on an out-of-state business trip when Yancey’s commission called a special meeting with 48 hours’ notice. They then voted unanimously to divorce Yancey’s branch from AMY. Per state regulations, the county had one year—until July 1, 2025—to inform the State Library of North Carolina of its decision and apply for funding as an independent library.
“It was such a shock,” said Briggs. For Wayne Edwards, the longtime head librarian, it felt like an “ambush.”
A month after the commission’s vote, Austin released a statement that addressed some concerns from residents. “I have had discussions with the State Library Employees and have been reassured that Yancey County will be able to receive the same funding that the AMY system received on behalf of Yancey County,” she wrote. “There is no evidence to support the idea that library services will be lost. The Commissioners look forward to continuing all the services that we currently have, and we realize what a valuable resource having a public library is to the community.”
But the commission offered little information to the public for months about the status of the withdrawal or what might come next.
In September, Hurricane Helene ravaged the county, killing 11 residents and bringing widespread mudslides and flooding. Yancey County suffered the highest amount of damage per capita—$4,000—in the region. The work of rebuilding surely caused some of the commission’s delay.
Many residents who sought more information about their library, which reopened shortly after the hurricane and provided a vital community hub, say they emailed the commission and never heard back.
An April 14 commission meeting promising a public update brought a packed house; 60 people filled the courthouse. The meeting commenced with the Pledge of Allegiance and a Christian prayer, before Austin announced they’d hired Whitney Leehr as the new library director, and two new librarians. (Leehr did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
Briggs would stay with AMY, but Yancey head librarian Wayne Edwards and other library staff would be out of a job.
The library has also been accepted into the NC Cardinal, an online catalog that provides intralibrary loans among branches. Austin said that AMY is permitting them to keep using the bookmobile, which stops at senior centers and childcare centers throughout the county, for one year. Yancey will contribute about $7,000 to the bookmobile for fiscal year 2025-26, Briggs said. Yancey County attorney Donny Laws told county staff over the winter that it was too late to seek funding for a bookmobile this year.
The regional library system is also allowing most materials to remain in Burnsville, though the collection of large-print books owned by AMY’s outreach program must be returned.
Austin also addressed a rumor that had been circulating around Yancey. “We’re not looking at removing anything from the library,” Austin told commissioners. “We’re not going to remove any books.”
Following Austin’s update, the commission voted 5-0 to approve the agreement withdrawing Yancey from AMY.
Only after the vote did the commission take public comment. About two dozen library regulars filed one-by-one to the microphone. Burnsville resident Allyson Heidenfelder questioned the logic of going independent. “If we have to remain with the AMY library system for [the bookmobile], why are we leaving?” she asked the commissioners. “The library was not broken. You broke it.”
Added Burnsville resident Kathy Weisfeld: “As others have said, you’ve never really explained why this is in our best interest.”
Not a single speaker voiced support for removing Yancey County Public Library from AMY.
Numerous Yancey County residents told The Assembly that they’d emailed questions about the status of the library to commissioners over the last two years and never received a response.
“The library was not broken. You broke it.”
Allyson Heidenfelder, Burnsville resident
The Assembly approached commission chair Whitson after the April 14 meeting and mentioned emailing him multiple times with no response. “I don’t do emails on that,” Whitson said, referring to his county government email. “Let me give you another one,” he said, offering a Gmail address. “I can’t get into [the government email] on my iPad,” he explained. “I can come here and do it, but I don’t have time.”
Whitson did not respond to multiple follow-up emails to the Gmail address he provided.
The Assembly requested public records related to the library from Whitson’s county email and personal Gmail. The county didn’t provide any. “There are no records that correspond to this request,” the county clerk responded via email.
Government officials using personal email accounts to do government business are supposed to forward them to their government accounts for record-keeping. County Manager Austin, who otherwise didn’t respond to any requests for comment, said the county asked Whitson to “provide any correspondence that is related to your records request either on personnel [sic] or work email … He assures us that if he has any that would submit those to our Clerk for disbursement.”
This situation concerns NC Open Government Coalition director Pate McMichael. “When you’re doing the public’s business, the public needs to be able to pull that paper trail,” McMichael said.
In a Facebook post last month, Whitson delivered an update about the library changes, noting that the new librarians starting in July are “very family-oriented, kid-oriented.”
“Just to be honest, if all the hoopla and all the circus wasn’t going on,” he said, “the vast, vast majority of the public wouldn’t even know that anything had transpired with the library.”
Last Days
At a Thursday morning story time in May, Chicken wanted the three Cows to stop jumping on her couch.
“No! More! Fun!”
Undeterred, the cows asked, “Is everyone ready for fun?”
“NOOOO!” Yancey County Public Library’s children’s librarian, Natasha Shannon—or Miss Natasha to the 15 toddlers who listened raptly from the carpet—clucked in Chicken’s voice as she manipulated a chicken puppet with one hand.
Shannon read three stories about barnyard animals, led a song with toy eggs to shake like maracas, and started a coloring project. She controlled the chaos like someone who spent 27 years as a teacher, moving along when a tiny voice interrupted her to proclaim “I love roosters!”
Shannon has been the children’s librarian for almost two years. But her last day as the children’s librarian in Yancey will be June 30; she will still serve AMY’s three other branches. Gesturing to the moms and grandmas mingling in the children’s section, she looked as if she might cry.
“I’m not sure everyone realizes I’m not going to be here,” she said later.
As patrons filed out after story time, Wayne Edwards, the head librarian, seemed frazzled. He had to cancel a tea party because his assistant was out, and he was the only employee to check out books, answer the phone, and troubleshoot the computers. They were also busy trying to pack up the materials that had to be returned to AMY.
Changes may also be afoot at AMY’s other branches. A new draft contract for Avery and Mitchell counties released in May would ban “displays of a political nature or dealing with matters of current political events,” and “culturally charged topics.” It would require library directors to “ensure that member libraries are not seen as endorsing a viewpoint or lifestyle choice related to any such issues,” and grant local boards final approval over purchasing library materials. Mitchell County attorney Four Eggers said Avery, Mitchell and Spruce Pine are currently working on revisions to the draft. “It is our hope to get this in place prior to July 1,” Eggers said.
Putting the selection of library materials “in the hands of board members,” rather than librarians, concerns Briggs. “This would imply there is some need to not trust library professionals to make those choices,” she said.
This week, Briggs announced her resignation at a regional library board meeting. Her last day will also be June 30. She is leaving by choice, but it is not a choice she wants to have made. “No matter how financially difficult it may be, I have to take time for my physical and mental health, because I’m not doing well,” she explained. She shared that she began psychotherapy to manage the stress of the past two years. Briggs, who was the NC Public Library Directors Association’s Director of the Year last year, said she isn’t going to work at libraries again. “At least not for a while,” she said.
For Edwards, the future is also uncertain: He, an associate librarian, a digital literacy librarian and the children’s librarian weren’t asked to stay on after July 1. The work he so loves is ending against his wishes, and he’s going back on the job market at age 58. He thought he’d stay at the Yancey library until retirement.
The lack of transition planning from the new library leaders concerns him. “They have not asked us a single question about procedures or how to do anything, where we buy supplies, how we catalog books,” Edwards said. “They’ve made no attempt at learning how we run the library.” Leehr, the new library director, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Landon Beaver, a Burnsville resident and therapist, is still hoping the changes might be stopped. He has informed the county of his intent to file a lawsuit for violation of the First Amendment, and retained the law firm Brooks Pierce. He recently launched a GoFundMe to raise $100,000 to cover legal expenses.
“This isn’t just our fight for our local library anymore,” Beaver said. “This is our fight for free speech for staying connected to our neighbors.”
In the meantime, it’s June again: Pride month. “Despite the ugliness of some people over the last two years, or maybe because of it, it’s more important than ever that all marginalized groups be seen and represented,” Edwards said.
Yancey’s Pride display this year is smaller and located on the second floor, rather than the lobby. But it’s still there.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Yancey Library will be named Toe River Valley regional library. It will maintain its name July 1. Avery, Mitchell, and Spruce Pine libraries will be called Toe River Valley regional library.
Jessica Wakeman is a freelance reporter based in Asheville.
Daniel Walton contributed reporting.