book banning thesis

What You Need to Know About the Book Bans Sweeping the US

What you need to know about the book bans sweeping the u.s., as school leaders pull more books off library shelves and curriculum lists amid a fraught culture war, we explore the impact, legal landscape and history of book censorship in schools..

• The American Library Association reported a record-breaking number of attempts to ban books in 2022— up 38 percent from the previous year. Most of the books pulled off shelves are “written by or about members of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color."
• U.S. school boards have broad discretion to control the material disseminated in their classrooms and libraries. Legal precedent as to how the First Amendment should be considered remains vague, with the Supreme Court last ruling on the issue in 1982.
• Battles to censor materials over social justice issues pose numerous implications for education while also mirroring other politically-motivated acts of censorship throughout history. 

Here are all of your questions about book bans answered by TC experts. 

Alex Eble, Assistant Professor of Economics and Education; Sonya Douglass, Professor of Education Leadership; Michael Rebell, Professor of Law and Educational Practice; and Ansley Erickson, Associate Professor of History and Education Policy. (Photos; TC Archives) 

How Do Book Bans Impact Students? 

Prior to the rise in bans, white male youth were already more likely to see themselves depicted in children’s books than their peers, despite research demonstrating how more culturally inclusive material can uplift all children, according to a study, forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics , from TC’s Alex Eble.  

“Books can change outcomes for students themselves when they see people who look like them represented,” explains the Associate Professor of Economics and Education. “What people see affects who they become, what they believe about themselves and also what they believe about others…Not having equitable representation robs people of seeing the full wealth of the future that we all can inhabit.” 

While books have stood in the crossfire of political battles throughout history, today’s most banned books address issues related to race, gender identity and sexuality — major flashpoints in the ongoing American culture war. But beyond limiting the scope of how students see themselves and their peers, what are the risks of limiting information access? 

The student plaintiffs in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982) march in protest of the Long Island school district's removal of titles such as Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. While the district would ultimately return the banned books to its shelves, the Supreme Court's ultimate ruling largely allowed school leaders to maintain discretion over information access. (Photo credit: unknown) 

“[Book bans] diminish the quality of education students have access to and restrict their exposure to important perspectives that form the fabric of a culturally pluralist society like the United States,” explains TC’s Sonya Douglas s, Professor of Education Leadership. “It's a battle over the soul of the country in many ways; it's about what we teach young people about our country, what we determine to be the truth, and what we believe should be included in the curriculum they're receiving. There's a lot at stake there.” 

Material stripped from libraries and curriculum include works written by Black authors that discuss police brutality, the history of slavery in the U.S. and other issues. As such, Black students are among those who may be most affected by bans across the country, but — in Douglass’ view — this is simply one of the more recent disappointments in a long history of Black communities being let down by public education — chronicled in her 2020 book, and further supported by a 2021 study from Douglass’ Black Education Research Center that revealed how Black families lost trust in schools following the pandemic response and murder of George Floyd.

In that historical and cultural context — even as scholars like Douglass work to implement Black studies curriculums — the failure of schools to properly integrate Black experiences into the curriculum remains vast. 

“We want to make sure that children learn the truth, and that we give them the capacity to handle truths that may be uncomfortable and difficult,” says Douglass, citing Germany as an example of a nation that has prioritized curriculum that highlights its own injustices, such as the Holocaust. “This moment again requires us to take stock of the fact that racism and bigotry still are a challenging part of American life. When we better understand that history, when we see the patterns, when we recognize the source of those issues, we can then do something about it.” 

Beginning in 1933, members of Hitler Youth regularly burned books written by prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers. (Photo: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo, dated 1938) 

Why Is Banning Books Legal? 

While legal battles over book censorship in schools consistently unfold at local levels, the wave of book bans across the U.S. surfaces a critical question: why hasn’t the United States had more definitive legal closure on this issue? 

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a noncommittal ruling that continues to keep school and library books in the political crosshairs more than 40 years later. In Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982), the Court deemed that “local school boards have broad discretion in the management of school affairs” and that discretion “must be exercised in a manner that comports with the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.” 

But what does this mean in practice? In these kinds of cases, the application of the First Amendment hinges on the existence of evidence that books are banned for political reasons and violate freedom of expression. However, without more explicit guidance, school boards often make decisions that prioritize “community values” first and access to information second. 

While today's recent book bans most frequently include topics related to racial justice and gender identity (pictured above), other frequently targeted titles include Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , The Kite Runner and The Handmaid's Tale . (Cover images courtesy of: Viking Books, Sourcebooks Fire, Balzer + Bray, Oni Press, Random House ‎ and Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 

“America traditionally has prided itself on local control of education — the fact that we have active citizen and parental involvement in school board issues, including curriculum,” explains TC’s Michael Rebell , Professor of Law and Educational Practice. “We have, whether you want to call it a clash or a balancing, of two legal considerations here: the ability of children to freely learn what they need to learn to be able to exercise their constitutional rights, and this traditional right of the school authorities to determine what the curriculum is.” 

So would students benefit from more national and uniform legal guidance on book banning? In this political climate, Rebell attests, the risks very well might outweigh the potential rewards. 

“Your local institutions are —in theory — protecting the values you believe in. And if somebody in Washington were going to say that we couldn't have books that talk about transgender rights and things in New York libraries, we'd go crazy, right?” said Rebell, who leads the Center for Educational Equity . “So I can't imagine that in this polarized environment, people would be in favor of federal law, whatever it said.” 

Why Do Waves of Book Bans Keep Happening?

Historians date censorship back all the way to the earliest appearance of written materials. Ancient Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti began eliminating historical texts in 259 B.C., and in 35 A.D., Roman emperor Caligula objected to the ideals of Greek freedom depicted in The Odyssey . In numerous waves of censorship since then, book bans have consistently manifested the struggle for political control. 

“We have to think about [the current bans] as part of a longer pattern of fights over what is in curriculum and what is kept out of it,” explains TC’s Ansley Erickson , Associate Professor of History and Education Policy, who regularly prepares local teachers on how to integrate Harlem history into social studies curriculum. 

“The United States’ history, since its inception, is full of uses of curriculum to shape politics, the economy and the culture,” says Erickson. “This is a really dramatic moment, but the curriculum has always been political, and people in power have always been using it to emphasize their power. And historically marginalized groups have always challenged that power.” 

One example: when Latinx students were forbidden from speaking Spanish in their Southwest schools throughout the 20th century, they worked to maintain their traditions and culture at home. 

“These bans really matter, but one of the ways we can imagine a response is by looking back at how people created spaces for what wasn’t given room for in the classroom,” Erickson says. 

What Could Happen Next?

American schools stand at a critical inflection point, and amid this heated debate, Rebell sees civil discourse at school board meetings as a paramount starting point for any sort of resolution. “This mounting crisis can serve as a motivator to bring people together to try to deal with our differences in respectful ways and to see how much common ground can be found on the importance of exposing all of our students to a broad range of ideas and experiences,” says Rebell. “Carve-outs can also be found for allowing parents who feel really strongly that certain content is inconsistent with their religious or other values to exempt their children from certain content without limiting the options for other children.”

But students, families and educators also have the opportunity to speak out, explains Douglass, who expressed concern for how her own daughter is affected by book bans. 

“I’d like to see a groundswell movement to reclaim the nation's commitment to education — to recognize that we're experiencing growing pains and changes in terms of what we stand for; and whether or not we want to live up to the democratic ideal of freedom of speech; different ideas in the marketplace, and a commitment to civics education and political participation,” says Douglass. 

As publishers and librarians file lawsuits to push back, students are also mobilizing to protest bans — from Texas to western New York and elsewhere. But as more local battles unfold, bigger issues remain unsolved. 

“We need to have a conversation as a nation about healing; about being able to confront the past; about receiving an apology and beginning that process of reconciliation,” says Douglass. “Until we tackle that head on, we'll continue to have these types of battles.” 

— Morgan Gilbard

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the speaker to whom they are attributed. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the faculty, administration, staff or Trustees either of Teachers College or of Columbia University.

Tags: Views on the News Education Policy K-12 Education Social Justice

Programs: Economics and Education Education Leadership History and Education

Departments: Education Policy & Social Analysis

Published Wednesday, Sep 6, 2023

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Banned and Challenged: Restricting access to books in the U.S.

Perspective, ashley hope pérez: 'young people have a right' to stories that help them learn.

Ashley Hope Pérez

Author Ashley Hope Pérez wrote Out of Darkness, which is on the American Library Association's lists of most banned books. Kaz Fantone/NPR hide caption

Author Ashley Hope Pérez wrote Out of Darkness, which is on the American Library Association's lists of most banned books.

This essay by Ashley Hope Pérez is part of a series of interviews with — and essays by — authors who are finding their books being challenged and banned in the U.S.

For over a decade, I lived my professional dream. I spent my days teaching college literature courses and writing novels. I regularly visited schools as an author and got to meet teens who reminded me of the students I taught in Houston — the amazing humans who had first inspired me to write for young adults.

Then in 2021, my dream disintegrated into an author and educator's nightmare as my novel Out of Darkness became a target for politically motivated book bans across the country.

Book News & Features

Efforts to ban books jumped an 'unprecedented' four-fold in 2021, ala report says.

Author Interviews

Banned books: author ashley hope pérez on finding humanity in the 'darkness'.

Attacks unfolded, not just on my writing but also on young people's right to read it. Hate mail and threats overwhelmed the inboxes where I once had received invitations for author visits and appreciative notes from readers. At the beginning of 2021, Out of Darkness had been on library shelves for over five years without a single challenge or complaint. As we reach the end of 2022, it has been banned in at least 29 school districts across the country.

From the earliest stages of writing, I knew Out of Darkness would be difficult — for me, and for readers. I drew my inspiration for the novel from an actual school disaster: the 1937 New London school explosion that killed hundreds in an East Texas oil town just 20 minutes from my childhood home. This tragic but little-known historical event serves as the backdrop for a fictional star-crossed romance between a Black teenager and a young Latina who has just arrived in the area.

As I researched the novel, I imagined the explosion as its most devastating event. But to engage honestly with the realities of the time and of my characters' lives, I had to grapple with systemic racism, personal prejudice, sexual abuse and domestic violence. As I wrote, the teenagers' circumstances began to tighten, noose-like, around their lives and love, leading to still more tragedy. I sought to show the depths of harm inflicted on some in this country without sensationalizing that history. The book portrays friendship, loving family, community and healthy relationships because they, too, are part of the characters' world. Then, as now, young people struggle mightily for joy, love and dignity.

When Out of Darkness was first published, I braced for objections. Would readers recoil from the harshness of my characters' realities? Or would they recognize how the novel invites connections between those realities and an ongoing reckoning with racialized violence and police brutality? To my relief, the novel received glowing reviews, earned multiple literary awards, and was named to "best of the year" lists by Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal . It appeared on reading lists across the country as a recommendation for ambitious young readers ready to face disquieting aspects of the American experience.

So it went until early 2021. In the wake of the 2020 presidential elections, right-wing groups pivoted from a national defeat to "local" issues. The latest wave of book banning exceeds anything ever documented by librarian or free-speech groups. The statistics for 2021, which represent only a fraction of actual removals, reflect a more than 600% increase in challenges and removals as compared to 2020. (See Everylibrary.org for a continually updated database of challenges and bans and PEN America's Banned in the USA reports for April 2022 and September 2022 for further context.)

These book bans do not reflect spontaneous parental concern. Instead, they are part of an orchestrated effort to sow suspicion of public schools as scarily "woke" and to signal opposition to certain identities and topics. Book banners often cite "sexually explicit content" as their reason for objecting to books in high schools. What distinguishes the targeted titles, though, is not their sexual content but that they overwhelmingly center the experiences of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people. If you were to stack up all the books with sexual content in any library, the tallest stack by far would be about white, straight characters. Tellingly, those are not the books under attack. Claims about "sexual content" are a pretext for erasing the stories that tell Black, Latinx, queer and other non-dominant kids that they matter and belong. Beyond telegraphing disapproval, book bans serve the interests of groups that have long sought to dismantle public education and shut down conversations about important issues.

Debates about the suitability of reading materials in school are nothing new. These include past efforts by progressives to reorient language arts instruction. Concerns about racist language and portrayals might well lead communities to seek alternatives to the teaching of works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . But de-emphasizing problematic classics does not generally entail removing the books from library collections. By contrast, in targeting high school libraries, conservative book banners seek to restrict what individual students may choose to read on their own , disregarding the judgment of school librarians who carefully select materials according to professional standards.

Rather than reading the books themselves, today's book banners rely instead on haphazard lists and talking points circulated online. Social media plays a central role in stoking the fires of censorship. Last year, a video of a woman ranting about a passage from Out of Darkness in a school board meeting went internationally viral. The woman's school board rant resulted in the removal of every copy of Out of Darkness from the district's libraries, triggered copycat performances, and fueled more efforts to ban my book.

Book banning poses a real professional and personal cost to authors and educators. For YA writers, losing access to school and library audiences can be career ending. And it is excruciating to watch people describe our life's work as "filth" or "garbage." We try to find creative ways to respond to the defamation, as I did in my own YouTube video . But there is no competing with the virality of outrage. Meanwhile, librarians and teachers face toxic work conditions that shift the focus from student learning to coping with harassment.

But book banning harms students, and their education, the most. Young people rely on school libraries for accurate information and for stories that broaden their understanding, offer hope and community, and speak honestly to challenges they face. As libraries become battlegrounds, teens notice which books, and which identities, are under attack. Those who share identities with targeted authors or characters receive a powerful message of exclusion: These books don't belong, and neither do you.

Back in 2004, my predominately Latinx high school students in Houston wanted — needed — books that reflected their lives and communities but few such books had been written. In the decades since, authors have worked hard to ensure greater inclusion and respect for the diversity of teen experiences. For students with fewer resources or difficult home situations, though, a book that isn't in the school library might as well not exist. Right-wing groups want to roll back the modest progress we've made, and they are winning.

These "wins" happen even without official bans. Formal censorship becomes unnecessary once bullying, threats and disruption shake educators' focus from students. The result is soft censorship . For example, a librarian reads an outstanding review of a book that would serve someone in their school, but they don't order it out of fear of controversy. This is the internalization of the banners' agenda. The effects of soft censorship are pervasive, pernicious and very difficult to document.

The needs of all students matter, not just those whose lives and identities line up with what book banners think is acceptable. Young people have a right to the resources and stories that help them mature, learn and understand their world in all its diversity. They need more opportunities, not fewer, to experience deep imaginative engagement and the empathy it inspires. We've had enough "banner" years. I hope 2023 returns the focus to young people and their right to read.

Ashley Hope Pérez, author of three novels for young adults, is a former high school English teacher and an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. Find her on Twitter and Instagram or LinkT .

When are book bans unconstitutional? A First Amendment scholar explains

Associate Professor of Law, University of Dayton

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Erica Goldberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The United States has become a nation divided over important issues in K-12 education, including which books students should be able to read in public school.

Efforts to ban books from school curricula , remove books from libraries and keep lists of books that some find inappropriate for students are increasing as Americans become more polarized in their views.

These types of actions are being called “book banning.” They are also often labeled “censorship.”

But the concept of censorship, as well as legal protections against it, are often highly misunderstood.

Book banning by the political right and left

On the right side of the political spectrum, where much of the book banning is happening, bans are taking the form of school boards’ removing books from class curricula.

Politicians have also proposed legislation banning books that are what some legislators and parents consider too mature for school-age readers, such as “ All Boys Aren’t Blue ,” which explores queer themes and topics of consent. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s classic “ The Bluest Eye ,” which includes themes of rape and incest, is also a frequent target.

In some cases, politicians have proposed criminal prosecutions of librarians in public schools and libraries for keeping such books in circulation.

Most books targeted for banning in 2021, says the American Library Association, “ were by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ persons .” State legislators have also targeted books that they believe make students feel guilt or anguish based on their race or imply that students of any race or gender are inherently bigoted .

There are also some attempts on the political left to engage in book banning as well as removal from school curricula of books that marginalize minorities or use racially insensitive language, like the popular “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Defining censorship

Whether any of these efforts are unconstitutional censorship is a complex question.

The First Amendment protects individuals against the government’s “ abridging the freedom of speech .” However, government actions that some may deem censorship – especially as related to schools – are not always neatly classified as constitutional or unconstitutional, because “censorship” is a colloquial term, not a legal term.

Some principles can illuminate whether and when book banning is unconstitutional.

Censorship does not violate the Constitution unless the government does it .

For example, if the government tries to forbid certain types of protests solely based on the viewpoint of the protesters, that is an unconstitutional restriction on speech. The government cannot create laws or allow lawsuits that keep you from having particular books on your bookshelf, unless the substance of those books fits into a narrowly defined unprotected category of speech such as obscenity or libel. And even these unprotected categories are defined in precise ways that are still very protective of speech.

The government, however, may enact reasonable regulations that restrict the “ time, place or manner ” of your speech, but generally it has to do so in ways that are content- and viewpoint-neutral. The government thus cannot restrict an individual’s ability to produce or listen to speech based on the topic of the speech or the ultimate opinions expressed.

And if the government does try to restrict speech in these ways, it likely constitutes unconstitutional censorship.

What’s not unconstitutional

In contrast, when private individuals, companies and organizations create policies or engage in activities that suppress people’s ability to speak, these private actions don’t violate the Constitution .

The Constitution’s general theory of liberty considers freedom in the context of government restraint or prohibition. Only the government has a monopoly on the use of force that compels citizens to act in one way or another. In contrast, if private companies or organizations chill speech, other private companies can experiment with different policies that allow people more choices to speak or act freely.

Still, private action can have a major impact on a person’s ability to speak freely and the production and dissemination of ideas. For example, book burning or the actions of private universities in punishing faculty for sharing unpopular ideas thwarts free discussion and unfettered creation of ideas and knowledge.

When schools can ‘ban’ books

It’s hard to definitively say whether the current incidents of book banning in schools are constitutional – or not. The reason: Decisions made in public schools are analyzed by the courts differently than censorship in nongovernment contexts.

Control over public education, in the words of the Supreme Court, is for the most part given to “ state and local authorities .” The government has the power to determine what is appropriate for students and thus the curriculum at their school.

However, students retain some First Amendment rights: Public schools may not censor students’ speech, either on or off campus, unless it is causing a “ substantial disruption .”

But officials may exercise control over the curriculum of a school without trampling on students’ or K-12 educators’ free speech rights.

There are exceptions to government’s power over school curriculum: The Supreme Court ruled, for example, that a state law banning a teacher from covering the topic of evolution was unconstitutional because it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the state from endorsing a particular religion.

School boards and state legislators generally have the final say over what curriculum schools teach. Unless states’ policies violate some other provision of the Constitution – perhaps the protection against certain kinds of discrimination – they are generally constitutionally permissible.

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Schools, with finite resources, also have discretion to determine which books to add to their libraries. However, several members of the Supreme Court have written that removal is constitutionally permitted only if it is done based on the educational appropriateness of the book, but not because it was intended to deny students access to books with which school officials disagree.

Book banning is not a new problem in this country – nor is vigorous public criticism of such moves . And even though the government has discretion to control what’s taught in school, the First Amendment ensures the right of free speech to those who want to protest what’s happening in schools.

• school curriculum
• Public schools
• First Amendment
• US Constitution
• Public libraries
• Toni Morrison
• School Boards
• Glenn Youngkin
• American Library Association

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The Hydra Nature of Book Banning and Censorship

A snapshot and two annotated bibliographies.

• Michelle Boyd Waters University of Oklahoma
• Shelly K. Unsicker-Durham University of Oklahoma

In Fall of 2022 two researchers set out to explore both scholarly work on censorship and news articles via social media, to help gain a broader understanding of censorship and book banning trends. The following research question guided their research: What does this wave of book banning and censorship look like across the US? What they discovered is a kind of censorship-Hydra, an evolving beast posing an ever-present danger, one that will likely take the courage, collaboration, and ingenuity of educators everywhere. This article offers a snapshot of this current beast of book banning and censorship in the form of two annotated bibliographies—one focused on news reports and trends in social media—the other focused on academic searches of scholarly articles.

Author Biographies

Michelle boyd waters, university of oklahoma.

Michelle Boyd Waters is a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma studying English education. She taught middle and high school English Language Arts for 10 years and is now studying the establishment and impact of writing centers in high schools. She is the Graduate Student Assistant Director at the OU Writing Center, an Oklahoma Writing Project Teacher Consultant, and co-editor of the Oklahoma English Journal.

Shelly K. Unsicker-Durham, University of Oklahoma

After 23 years of teaching English Language Arts, Shelly is a PhD candidate with the University of Oklahoma in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum, where she has also served as graduate instructor, researcher, and co-editor of Study & Scrutiny. Her favorite research pursuits include expressive writing pedagogy, teacher conversations, and young adult literature. 

THREE REFERENCE LISTS:

REFERENCES FOR ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY #1

Authors speak out on censorship. (2022, March 11). National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/resources/ncte-intellectual-freedom-center/authors-speak-out-on-censorship/

Backus, F., & Salvanto, A. (2022, April 6). Big majorities reject book bans - CBS news poll. CBS News. Retrieved September 25, 2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-bans-opinion-poll-2022-02-22/ . DOI: https://doi.org/10.3886/icpsr04092.v1

Banned & Challenged Books: Simon & Schuster. New Book Releases, Bestsellers, Author Info and more at Simon & Schuster. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/bannedbooksweek

Blake, M. (2022, July 27). A surprising list of recently banned books. Penguin Books UK. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2022/05/surprising-books-that-have-been-recently-banned-2019

Chess, K. (2018, September 8). Why I hate censorship in ya fiction. Khristina Chess. https://www.khristinachess.com/blog/2018/9/8/why-i-hate-censorship-in-ya-fiction

Friedman, J., & Farid Johnson, N. (2022, September 19). Banned in the USA: The growing movement to censor books in schools. PEN America. Retrieved September 25, 2022. https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/

Frisaro, F. (2023, May 24). Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem banned by Florida School. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/amanda-gormans-inauguration-poem-banned-by-florida-school

Gregory, J. (2022, September 9). 22 titles pulled from Missouri district shelves to comply with state law and more: Censorship roundup. School Library Journal. Retrieved October 2, 2022. https://www.slj.com/story/22-titles-pulled-from-missouri-district-shelves-to-comply-with-state-law-and-more-censorship-roundup

Jensen, K. (2022, August 4). A template for talking with school and Library Boards about book bans: Book censorship news, August 5, 2022. Book Riot. Retrieved September 25, 2022. https://bookriot.com/book-censorship-news-august-5-2022 . DOI: https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0173.0203

Jensen, K. (2022, August 25). States that have enacted book Ban laws: Book censorship news, August 26, 2022. Book Riot. Retrieved October 2, 2022. https://bookriot.com/states-that-have-enacted-book-ban-laws-2022/

Jensen, K. (2023, May 25). When do we move from advocacy to preparation?. Book Riot. https://bookriot.com/when-do-we-move-from-advocacy-to-preparation/

The Learning Network. (2022, February 18). What students are saying about banning books from school libraries. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/learning/students-book-bans.html

Lopez, S. (2023, May 8). The extreme new tactic in the crusade to ban books. Time. https://time.com/6277933/state-book-bans-publishers/

Magnusson, T. (n.d.). Book censorship database by Dr. Tasslyn Magnusson. EveryLibrary Institute. Retrieved September 25, 2022. https://www.everylibraryinstitute.org/book_censorship_database_magnusson

Miller, S. (2022). Intellectual Freedom Center Provides Support for Censorship Challenges. Council Chronicle, 32(1), 16–18. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/cc202232050 . DOI: https://doi.org/10.58680/cc202232050

“Not recommended” reading: The books Hong Kong is purging from public libraries. (2023, May 26). Hong Kong Free Press. https://hongkongfp.com/2023/05/26/not-recommended-reading-the-books-hong-kong-is-purging-from-public-libraries . DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110966879.26a

op de Beeck, N. (2023, May 2). Turning a censorship controversy into a learning opportunity. PublishersWeekly.com. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/92172-turning-a-censorship-controversy-into-a-learning-opportunity.html

Parker, C. (2023, July 25). Readers can now access books banned in their area for free with New App. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/banned-book-club-app-180982592/

Pendharkar, E. (2023, June 29). How students are reacting to book bans in their schools. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-students-are-reacting-to-book-bans-in-their-schools/2023/06

Price, R. (2022, September 19). The power of reading, or why I do what I do. Adventures in Censorship. https://adventuresincensorship.com/blog/2022/9/17/the-power-of-reading-or-why-i-do-what-i-do

Russell, B. Z. (2022, September 23). Panel: Book-banning push is coordinated, national effort. Idaho Press. Retrieved October 2, 2022. https://www.idahopress.com/news/local/panel-book-banning-push-is-coordinated-national-effort/article_cb6606aa-3b89-11ed-be6c-67820ea458a1.html

School Library Journal. (2023, May 25). Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem Restricted in Florida District After One Parent Complains | Censorship News. https://www.slj.com/story/newsfeatures/Amanda-Gormans-Inaugural-Poem-Restricted-in-Florida-District-After-One-Parent-Complains-Censorship-News

REFERENCES FOR ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY #2

Beck, S., & Stevenson, A. (2018). Teaching contentious books regarding immigration: the case of Pancho Rabbit. Reading Teacher, 72(20), 265-273. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1739

Boyd, A. S., Rose, S. G., & Darragh, J. J. (2021). Shifting the conversation around teaching sensitive topics: Critical colleagueship in a teacher discourse community. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 65(2), 129-137. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1186

Buehler, J. (2023). Voices of Young Adult Literature authors in the conversation about censorship. English Journal, 112(5), pp. 64-70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.58680/ej202332423

Collins, J. E. (2022). Policy solutions: Defying the gravitational pull of education politics. Phi Delta Kappan, 104(1), 62-63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217221123654

Dallacqua, A. (2022). “Let Me Just Close My Eyes”: Challenged and Banned Books, Claimed Identities, and Comics. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,66(2), 134-138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1250

Dávila, D. The Tacit Censorship of Youth Literature: A Taxonomy of Text Selection Stances. Child Lit Educ 53, 376–391 (2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-022-09498-5

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Hartsfield, D. E., & Kimmel, S. C. (2020) Exploring educators figured worlds of controversial literature and adolescent readers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(4), 443-451. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.989

Hlwyak, S., Ed. (2021, April). State of America's libraries 2021: Special report: Covid-19. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/news/sites/ala.org.news/files/content/State-of-Americas-Libraries-Report-2021-4-21.pdf

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Lycke, K., & Lucey, T. (2018). The Messages We Miss: Banned Books, Censored Texts, and Citizenship. Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 9(1), 1–26. 3

Matthews, C. (2018). Sexuality. Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 27(2), 68-74.

Mehan, K., & Friedman, J. (2023). Banned in the USA: State laws supercharge book suppression in schools. PEN America. https://pen.org/report/banned-in-the-usa-state-laws-supercharge-book-suppression-in-schools/

Metzgar, M., & McGowan, M. J. (2022). Viewpoint diversity at UNC Charlotte. Acta Educationis Generalis, 12(3), 1-12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/atd-2022-0020

Moffet, J. (1988). Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of Censorship, Conflict, and Consciousness. Southern Illinois University.

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Pekoll, K. (2020). Managing censorship challenges beyond books. Knowledge Quest, 49(1), 28-33.

PEN America. (2022, April). Banned in the USA: Rising school book bans threaten free expression and students’ First Amendment Rights (April 2022). https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/#what

PEN America. (2022, Sept. 19). New report: 2,500+ book bans across 32 states during the 2021-22 school year. https://pen.org/press-release/new-report-2500-book-bans-across-32-states-during-2021-22-school-year/

Pérez, A. H. (2022). Defeating the censor within: How to hold your stand for youth access to literature in the face of school book bans. Knowledge Quest, 50(5), 34-39.

Rumberger, A. (2019). The elementary school library: Tensions between access and censorship. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 20(4), 409–421. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949119888491

SLJ Staff. (2023, April 20). New PEN America Report Shows Increase in Book Bans Driven by State Legislation. School Library Journal. https://www.slj.com/story/censorship/New-PEN-America-Report-Shows-Increase-in-Book-Bans-Driven-by-State-Legislation

Steele, J. E. (2020). A History of Censorship in the United States. Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy, 5(1), 6-19. https://www.ala.org/news/sites/ala.org.news/files/content/State-of-Americas-Libraries-Report-2021-4-21.pdf

Sulzer, M. A., & Thein, A. H. (2016). Reconsidering the hypothetical adolescent in evaluating and teaching young adult literature. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(2), 163-171. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.556

Vissing, Y., & Juchniewicz, M. (2023). Children’s book banning, censorship and human rights. In J. Zajda, P. Hallam, & J. Whitehouse (Eds.), Globalisation, values education and teaching democracy, vol 35 (pp. 181-201). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15896-4_12

Walter, B., & Boyd, A. S. (2019). A threat or just a book? Analyzing responses to Thirteen Reasons Why in a discourse community. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(6), 615-623. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.939

Woo, A., Lee, S., Tuma, A. P., Kaufman, J. H., Lawrence, R. A., & Reed, N. (2023). Walking on Eggshells--Teachers' Responses to Classroom Limitations on Race-or Gender-Related Topics: Findings from the 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey. Research Report. RR-A134-16. RAND Corporation. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/rra134-16

REFERENCES NOT INCLUDED IN THE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3).

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. (2022, October 20). Hydra. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hydra-Greek-mythology

Foster, M. V. (2022, August 23). NPS teacher resigns from district after sharing QR code for library access with classroom. FOX 25, Oklahoma (KOKH). https://okcfox.com/news/local/norman-public-schools-nps-norman-high-school-teacher-summer-boismeir-house-bill-1775-hb1775-american-civil-liberties-union-aclu-first-amendment-critical-race-theories-crt-book-ban-oklahoma-state-board-of-education-race-sex-discrimination?fbclid=IwAR0WiSTlBqucyBFZLzDIbKqrmRJ9PMOG-wKbGLihujHOBiAzidJn9I7F_Ho

Hill, J. A. (2023). Legitimate state interest of educational censorship: the chilling effect of Oklahoma House Bill 1775. Oklahoma Law Review, 75(2), 385-408.

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Penharkar, E. (2022, August 2). Two Okla. districts get downgraded Accreditations for violating state’s anti-CRT Law. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/two-okla-districts-get-downgraded-accreditations-for-violating-states-anti-crt-law/2022/08

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Suares, W. (2022, August24). ‘I am a walking HB1775 violation’: Former Norman teacher discusses book ban controversy. FOX 25 Oklahoma (KOKH). https://okcfox.com/news/local/summer-boismier-norman-public-schools-critical-race-theory-brooklyn-public-library-qr-code-house-bill-1775-oklahoma-teacher-resigned-education-books?fbclid=IwAR2Pz72tTGDJbZrEeGEm6LYaaJb17ojMMTrztDxU_6uBvZcDD7cVIJvf5yw

Stafford, W. (2022, July 28). Two Oklahoma school districts punished for violating CRT ban. FOX 25, Oklahoma (KOKH). https://okcfox.com/news/local/2-ok-school-district-punished-for-violating-crt-ban-tulsa-public-schools-and-mustang-public-schools-accreditation-with-warning-house-bill-1775-accreditation-with-warning-accreditation-with-deficiencies

Taylor, J., & Fife, A. (2023, August 3). After a state law banning some lessons on race, Oklahoma teachers tread lightly on the Tulsa Race Massacre. The Frontier. https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/after-a-state-law-banning-some-lessons-on-race-oklahoma-teachers-tread-lightly-on-the-tulsa-race-massacre/?fbclid=IwAR1PBzCAnjyI59RRArRTNudvmJydz5hYvZghABDSLjYPoq0tmcDsYRj8Lqc . DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74679-7_3

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Woo, A., Lee, S., Tuma, A. P., Kaufman, J. H., Lawrence, R. A., & Reed, N. (2023). Walking on Eggshells—Teachers’ Responses to Classroom Limitations on Race-or Gender-Related Topics. Rand American Educational Panels. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA100/RRA134-16/RAND_RRA134-16.pdf . DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/rra134-16

Copyright (c) 2023 Michelle Boyd Waters, Shelly K. Unsicker-Durham

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Teaching in the Face of Book Bans

• Posted November 30, 2023
• By Elizabeth M. Ross
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Education Policy
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education
• Teachers and Teaching

In the second part of our series on helping educators navigate book challenges , Timothy Patrick McCarthy , historian and lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, encourages teachers to resist censorship efforts by taking control of their own curriculum in creative ways. In an interview, he shares historical perspective and advice for educators.

Why, from your disciplinary perspective, are book bans harmful?

As a historian, I know that people who ban books are never on the right side of history. During two and a half centuries of slavery in the United States, white elites routinely enacted laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read and write. The denial of literacy — and education, more broadly — was one of the many racist barriers to liberation for Black people. During the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, book banners continued these kinds of repressive practices in new and dramatic ways. Students in the German Student Union and other Nazi conspirators staged public book burnings, where tens of thousands of books by Jewish, gay, and other dissident authors were destroyed. One of the most iconic photographs from that time depicts a book burning at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, where Magnus Hirschfeld and other scholars conducted groundbreaking studies on human sexuality. These are just two examples of the long history of knowledge destruction, which continues today in the accelerating and intensifying efforts to ban books and control curriculum throughout the United States. As the fugitive-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote of learning to read in his 1845 autobiography , “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” And that’s the point: Book banners (and burners) understand the threat that freedom and education for the oppressed poses to their own power and privilege, which is why they are still trying to deny these things by any means necessary.                

What advice can you offer educators about how to navigate or challenge book bans and other efforts to censor materials in schools and libraries?

These are treacherous times in education. We are living in an age of bullies where schools are once again in the crosshairs of the culture wars. In this context, to fight the forces of bigotry and censorship is as risky as it is urgent. For educators who can and want to take these risks, I would recommend several strategies: 

• Practice what I call “protest pedagogy,” resisting attempts to ban books by taking control of your curriculum in creative ways.   I know this is easier said than done, especially in public schools that are subjected to restrictive state standards and reactionary public pressures. But it can be done . In this digital age, encourage your students to do outside and online research, discover alternative sources and archives, and choose their own topics for exploration and analysis. Give them direction verbally and virtually — as opposed to, say, in writing and in class — and allow them to incorporate creative forms (art, videos, podcasts, social media) into the work they submit for evaluation. Introduce them to primary documents and public libraries, inspire them to interview their elders and share their own stories, and interrogate the old texts in new ways. Organize DonorsChoose or GoFundMe campaigns so your friends can buy banned books for your classroom libraries — or better yet, get your friendly publishers to donate them. There are many ways to resist these unjust forces and policies by teaching around them.          
• Build your collective power by connecting with the kindred people who are already doing this work all over the country. There are networks of students, teachers, and parents in some of the states with the most draconian policies and practices. (Florida, Texas, Tennessee.) There are also many of us in colleges and universities — as well as libraries and professional associations — who stand ready to support whatever efforts you are organizing in your schools and communities.    
• Run for school board! In recent years, the forces fueling book bans and other attempts at curricular control have been successful in getting their representatives elected to school boards across the country. This gives them more power to censor what people teach and learn. Those of us who value free speech and critical thinking, who honor diversity and the right to an equitable education, who embrace the search for historical and scientific truth — we need to run for school board, too. And if we decide not to run, let’s find ways to support (and vote for) good candidates who do. We cannot cede any more power in the field of education to people who are persistently devoted to the nation’s miseducation.                 

"We don’t need to protect young people from the truth. We need to encourage them to be critical, curious, and compassionate." 

What advice do you have about how and when to teach controversial topics and books in the classroom that have been challenged or banned elsewhere?

As a general rule, topics and books get the reputation for being “controversial” because they contain truths that make people uncomfortable. One need only look at the most “popular” justifications for book bans: because they center characters who are Black, Brown, and queer and content that deals with LGBTQ+ or race matters. But it is never too early to teach people the truth. If society teaches our young people to be racist surely our schools can teach them the long history of racism and anti-racism in the United States. When it comes to “age appropriate” texts, I am inclined to leave that to the writers who write the books, publishers who publish them, teachers who teach them, the students who read them — and the scholars who have spent their careers studying various aspects of social identity formation and child development. The loud cries of “liberty” from people who want to censor free speech and deny the right to education ring hollow. We don’t need to protect young people from the truth. We need to encourage them to be critical, curious, and compassionate. We need to free them — and all of us — from the forces of fear, prejudice, and willful ignorance that are currently tearing the nation apart. 

What additional resources can you share with educators from your own or others’ work?

In different ways, two of my own books — The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition and Reckoning with History: Unfinished Stories of American Freedom — challenge the “master narratives” to center a more inclusive history of the United States. I would also recommend The 1619 Project , History UnErased , Zinn Education Project , Facing History and Ourselves , and Making Gay History , all of which provide rich and diverse resources for teachers and learners interested in a more honest engagement with the American past and its connection to our collective present and future.

Extra reading:

• Brave Awakenings in an Age of Bullies
• As Luck Would Have It

Navigating Book Bans

A guide for educators as efforts intensify to censor books

• Families and Community

Usable Knowledge

Connecting education research to practice — with timely insights for educators, families, and communities

Related Articles

Book Bans and the Librarians Who Won't Be Hushed

How educators are speaking out in response to recent — and increasing — book bans

From Street Smart to School Smart

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What Are We Protecting Children from by Banning Books?

By Katy Waldman

You can find, on the Web site for Duval County public schools, in Florida, a list of books nominated for removal from the district’s libraries between 1978 and 2009. It’s a revealing artifact: a map of cultural anxieties and a portrait of books as enduring flash points. The challenges range from endearing and silly to sinister. Some preoccupations remain with us: race and history, profanity, sex. Roald Dahl (“vulgar, unethical”) was a frequent offender. “ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ,” by Judy Blume , got challenged once, in the eighties, for irreligiosity and again, in the two-thousands, for “introduction to pornography.” Other nominations are more idiosyncratic: in 1983, “Little Red Riding Hood” was side-eyed for “violence, wine”; a goofy poetry collection, “ The Robots Are Coming ,” drew criticism, in 2004 and 2005, for “voodoo, the Devil, etc.” A prerogative of parenting is to not have to explain yourself—“ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues ” was tersely declared “not suitable”—and there is, permeating the list, not so much a driving vision as a surpassing irritability. (“ 101 Ways to Bug Your Parents ” is “rude, disrespectful”; a mischievous romp called “ Four Good Friends ” has a “negative, nonproductive tone.”)

Still, as a document of the culture war, Duval County’s list reflects a fragile sort of détente. Parents objected to particular books, and a committee reviewed their objections. Some titles were banned or restricted; many were marked “open access” and returned to the shelves. As libraries have become the latest targets of an anti-“woke” backlash stoked by Republican politicians, that system, however flawed, has gone the way of the papyrus scroll. In early 2023, parents in Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, discovered that thousands of library books had been removed pending mass review—a response to House Bill 1467, which Governor Ron DeSantis signed in March, 2022, and which mandates that all books (in libraries, on curriculums, on reading lists) undergo vetting by a “certified media specialist.” (A spokeswoman for Duval County public schools wrote in an e-mail that about 1.5 million titles were being evaluated.) The texts must contain no pornography and be “suited to student needs.” A widely circulated training video borrows language from Florida’s controversial Stop WOKE Act: media specialists should avoid material that provokes feelings of “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” related to race or gender. As my colleague Charles Bethea reports , public education in the state has since taken a dystopian turn; by one estimate a third of school districts preëmptively put restrictions on their libraries. Classroom shelves, Bethea writes, have become spectacles of dour absurdism, covered in signs announcing “Books Are NOT for Student Use!!”

Book bans, spearheaded by politicians and advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty, have been proliferating over the past few years. A PEN America paper , published last September, records 2,532 instances of book banning in thirty-two states between July, 2021, and June, 2022. The challenges are spread throughout the country but cluster in Texas and Florida. Their targets are diverse, running the gamut from earnestly dorky teen love stories and picture books about penguins to Pulitzer-winning works of fiction . Some are adult potboilers that have found their way onto school-library shelves: three out of twenty-one books reportedly recently whacked in Madison County, Virginia, were written by Stephen King, and two were written by Anne Rice. Other bannees—including “ Strega Nona ,” a charming folktale about a pot that won’t stop cooking noodles—are presumably vectors of witchcraft. Still others, if you squint, could fall under the category of “pornography,” which is outlawed by DeSantis’s H.B. 1467. (“ Tricks ,” by Ellen Hopkins, is an introduction to grimy realism, replete with drug use and blow jobs.) Yet a whiff of pretext surrounds more than a few of the cries of obscenity. “ Lawn Boy ,” a semi-autobiographical work by the writer Jonathan Evison, was flagged for pedophilia yet portrays a twentysomething recalling a sexual experience he had as a fourth grader with another fourth grader.

The most frequently banned class of books are those intended for “young adult” readers—between the ages of twelve and eighteen. It makes a certain amount of sense that Y.A.—an awkward, gawky genre, as hard to delineate as adolescence itself—is the target of the majority of bans. Some Y.A. novels are essentially adult novels with the ages changed; some seem intended for much younger children; a lot of them fall somewhere in the middle. PEN ’s list includes pitch-black and intense books that take up mental illness, addiction, cruelty, or social ostracization. (“ The Truth About Alice ,” by Jennifer Mathieu, considers slut shaming; “ Speak ,” by Laurie Halse Anderson, posits mutism as a trauma response to rape.) And a number of the banned titles—“ 13 Reasons Why ,” “ The Perks of Being a Wallflower ,” “ We Are the Ants ”—address suicide. But many more of the prohibitions seem to cohere around a specific political vision. According to the PEN report, forty-one per cent of the banned books featured L.G.B.T.Q.+ themes, protagonists, or prominent secondary characters; the next-largest category of non grata texts has “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.” Other problem subjects include “race and racism,” “rights,” and “religious minorities.”

The two most banned books in the country—“ Gender Queer ,” by Maia Kobabe, and “ All Boys Aren’t Blue ,” by George M. Johnson—meld didacticism with profound gentleness. The first, which recounts Kobabe’s experience of having a nonconforming gender identity, briefly shows oral sex and masturbation, but foregrounds the process of learning to accept oneself and others. (Its verboten status may also have to do with its being a graphic memoir, with images easy to lift out of context and fewer words for censorious parents to slog through.) Johnson’s book has darker shades. Growing up, the queer main character is attacked by bullies and molested by a family member. Yet the work’s message of self-fashioning may be its most provocative gesture. Johnson addresses readers directly, reassuring them of their beauty and agency. “Let yourself unlearn everything you thought you knew about yourself,” he says, in a sweetly serious oracular diction, sourced equally from Walt Whitman and “Sesame Street.” And: “Should you not like your name, change it. It is yours.”

Kobabe’s and Johnson’s works are packed with nutritious morals, helpful lessons, and affirmations as ringing as they are intimate. Grownups might find this mode exhausting—it’s not just conservative culture warriors who deride Y.A. as preachy and excessive; literary critics also get their hits in—but one of its upsides is a commitment to engaging with kids on their own terms. (Adolescents on journeys of self-making can be very preachy and excessive!) Even the banned books that contend with contemporary politics weave their themes into stories of young people finding an independent identity, or discovering ways in which the world is not as it seems. “ The Hate U Give ,” by Angie Thomas, studies the reverberations of police violence, but it’s a novel of tender introspection, not an indoctrination manual. The protagonist, Starr, begins the story changing her voice when she’s “around ‘other’ people.” “I don’t talk like me or sound like me,” she confides. “I choose every word carefully and make sure I pronounce them well.” Her triumphantly corny journey entails learning to move through different spaces proudly as herself.

Other banned books maintain an even more oblique relationship to politics. There are few soapboxes in “ The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian ,” by Sherman Alexie; there is the Spokane Reservation—close-knit, dilapidated, blasphemous, and holy. The book is part comedy: its protagonist, Junior, travesties romanticized notions of boyhood with his nerdy glasses and scrawny body. (Alexie himself performed standup.) But the humor gets tangled with critique. Junior scoffs at the silver linings and neat moralism that so often streak through sanitized—and therefore child-friendly—narratives. “Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance,” he thinks. “Poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”

If there’s a neon-flashing message here, it is that heterogeneous experiences produce useful insights. And the novel’s dedication to treating kids like adults makes it potentially alluring for actual adults as well. Alexie speaks to the alienated teen-ager eating Cheetos in all of our mental basements—or, maybe, to the one discovering the eroticism of libraries. “Every book is a mystery,” Junior realizes. “And if you read all of the books ever written, it’s like you’ve read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you just keep on learning so much more you need to learn.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” his friend Gordy replies. “Now doesn’t that give you a boner?”

“I am rock hard,” Junior says.

As this scene suggests, libraries always exude at least a little transgressiveness. The anxiety about what kids are reading inevitably bleeds into fear about what else they’re doing—the trope of the sexy librarian, ever about to loosen her hair and initiate you into forbidden knowledge, exists for a reason. But books are obscene in another way. Their plots are irrevocable; they conjure up worlds in their opening pages that they will go on to transform or destroy by the end; they are harbingers of mortality, telling us that we are going to die. (The eerie images of the denuded bookcases in Florida feel ticklishly apt.) Turning the page of a text, “we feel instantly youthful,” the unnamed narrator of “ Checkout 19 ,” a novel by Claire-Louise Bennett , thinks. But, “by the time we get to the bottom of the right page, we have aged approximately twenty years. . . . The book has dropped. Our face has dropped. We have jowls.”

Knowledge is power, but it can also age you, make you vulnerable and afraid. Wishing to protect children from the realities of adult life—grubby, earthbound, disappointing—for at least a little while is deeply human. Kids mature at different rates, and it’s not unreasonable for the parents of twelve-year-olds to want to keep their own children from reading the same books as eighteen-year-olds.

But a glance at the list of most frequently banned books makes clear that “mature content” is a fig leaf: what parents and advocacy groups are challenging in these books is difference itself. In their vision of childhood—a green, sweet-smelling land invented by Victorians and untouched by violence, or discrimination, or death—white, straight, and cisgender characters are G-rated. All other characters, meanwhile, come with warning labels. When childhood is racialized, cisgendered, and de-queered, insisting on “age-appropriate material” becomes a way to instill doctrine and foreclose options for some readers, and to evict other readers from childhood entirely.

The recent wave of bans comes as many Republicans, in their opposition to gun control, climate science, food stamps, public education, and other social services, work assiduously to render the lives of American children as unchildlike as possible. A number of grownups apparently feel emboldened to spend their lives playing peekaboo with reality. Their kids may not have that luxury. ♦

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The Cases Against Book Bans

After a string of wins, significant developments loom in several book-banning lawsuits.

Amid a three-year nationwide surge in book bans , 2024 began on a hopeful note for freedom-to-read advocates, with legal victories in book-banning lawsuits in Iowa, Florida, and Texas. But after some early successes, several cases are poised to enter a critical next phase. As the wheels of justice grind on, PW rounded up the status of some of the more closely watched book-banning suits.

Perhaps no lawsuit has generated more attention than the challenge to HB 900 in Texas, which, among its provisions, would have forced booksellers in the state to rate books for sexual content as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. In January, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld district court judge Alan D. Albright’s decision to block the most odious parts of the law. But a subsequent order from the Fifth Circuit has delivered something of wake-up call for freedom-to-read advocates.

On April 16, the court declined the state’s motion to have their appeal reheard en banc by the full Fifth Circuit, letting Albright’s decision stand. But the nine-to-eight vote was a little too close for comfort. Furthermore, five of the 17 Fifth Circuit judges filed a dissent suggesting they would have overturned Albright.

The fight over HB 900 still may not be over. Despite the Fifth Circuit deciding the case in January—which would put the case beyond the usual 90-day window to petition the Supreme Court for review—lawyers told PW the Fifth Circuit’s delay in issuing a final mandate has extended the deadline to July 15. At press time, state officials have not said whether they intend to petition the Supreme Court.

Another closely watched Texas case remains undecided before the Fifth Circuit, despite the appeal being heard nearly a year ago. The case, Little v. Llano County , was first filed by a group of library patrons in April 2022 and accuses Llano County officials of unconstitutionally removing allegedly inappropriate books from library shelves. In March 2023, a federal judge found for the plaintiffs and ordered the removed books to be returned to library shelves.

Llano County officials then appealed to the Fifth Circuit, where oral arguments were heard last June . At the hearing, one of the panel’s conservative judges, Kyle Duncan (who also signed on to the April 16 dissent in the HB 900 case), extensively questioned why county officials couldn’t just remove “pornographic” books from library shelves, even though that wasn’t at issue in the appeal. Indeed, Llano County’s main argument was that the books were not removed because of their content but as part of a simple “weeding” exercise.

For now, the books are back on library shelves. But court watchers told PW the lengthy wait for this decision is puzzling.

In another closely watched case featuring library books, federal judge Sharon Gleason is weighing whether to order dozens of books taken from library shelves in the Mat-Su Borough School District in Alaska returned while a lawsuit challenging their removal is heard.

Filed in November 2023 by a group of eight plaintiffs, and supported by the ACLU of Alaska and advocacy group the Northern Justice Project, the suit accuses administrators in the Mat-Su district, located just north of Anchorage, of pulling 56 titles from school libraries without any formal review, based solely on a handful of complaints. The books include classics like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , a number of books by and about people of color and the LGBTQ community, and titles covering adolescent health.

At an April 1 hearing, attorneys for the school board told the judge a review of the books was ongoing. Lawyers for plaintiffs noted that the district’s review committee wasn’t even assembled until after the books were removed. Gleason was expected to rule within two weeks, as the school year is winding down, but it has now been nearly six weeks since the hearing.

Freedom-to-read advocates celebrated a big win back in December when a federal judge blocked parts of Iowa state law SF 496 , one of the nation’s most contentious book-banning bills. But the state’s appeal to overturn the block is heating up.

Signed into law in May 2023 , SF 496 seeks to ban from school libraries all books with depictions of sex as well as all materials and instruction involving “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” for students through sixth grade. But in his December 29 decision, judge Stephen Locher found the bill was “unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny.”

In her March appeal brief, Iowa attorney general Brenna Bird told the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals that Locher’s injunction “risks students’ irreversible exposure to inappropriate materials.” In their response, filed last month, the plaintiffs—which include Penguin Random House, the Iowa State Education Association, a group of authors, a coalition of Iowa parents and students, Lambda Legal, and the ACLU of Iowa—countered that any law that “requires librarians to remove hundreds of award-winning, classic, and other educationally valuable fiction and nonfiction books has no constitutional justification.”

Meanwhile, in a show of solidarity, five more publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks) signed on to the suit in April. As of last week, the state’s appeal is now briefed and oral argument is set for June 11 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

In January, federal judge T. Kent Wetherell ruled that a federal lawsuit over book bans in the Escambia County School District can proceed —a significant win after the judge initially expressed skepticism about the viability of the suit.

Filed in May 2023 by PEN America, Penguin Random House, a group of parents, and a group of authors including David Levithan, George M. Johnson, Ashley Hope Pérez, and Kyle Lukoff, the suit alleges that school administrators are disproportionately targeting for removal books by and about the LGBTQ community and people of color.

The case is now in discovery, which is proceeding, albeit slowly. And barring a settlement, this case is likely to hang around. Last month, Wetherell extended the discovery deadlines to mid-October.

In Arkansas

Last July, federal judge Timothy Brooks temporarily blocked two key provisions of Act 372, a controversial law that would have exposed librarians, teachers, and booksellers for exposing minors to allegedly harmful materials. On May 16, Tess Vrbin reported in the Arkansas Advocate that the plaintiffs are now seeking a permanent injunction .

In his ruling, Brooks concluded that portions of the law are "too vague to be understood and implemented effectively" and that, if enacted, would "permit, if not encourage, library committees and local governmental bodies to make censorship decisions based on content or viewpoint, which would violate the First Amendment." The case was filed on behalf of a library-led coalition of 18 plaintiffs, including the Central Arkansas Library System and a powerful alliance of library, publishing, author, bookseller, and advocacy groups, including the Freedom to Read Foundation (the ALA's First Amendment Defense arm), the Association of American Publishers , the American Booksellers Association , the Authors Guild, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund , and Democracy Forward.

The case is scheduled for trial in October.

This article has been updated

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Does Banning Books Violate the First Amendment?

Feb 15, 2023 | The Respect Rundown

At the start of every school year, there are renewed efforts to ban books in school libraries and public libraries. According to the American Library Association (ALA), the 2021-2022 school year had a record number of book ban requests and the present school year is on track to break that record.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom told the Associated Press. “It’s both the number of challenges and the kinds of challenges. It used to be a parent had learned about a given book and had an issue with it. Now we see campaigns where organizations are compiling lists of books, without necessarily reading or even looking at them.”

According to the ALA, in 2022, there were attempts to ban, challenge, or restrict access to 1,651 different book titles in the United States—the highest number of complaints since the group began documenting book challenges more than 20 years ago. The Index of School Book Bans, compiled by PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free speech, goes even deeper. In its account, published in September 2022, PEN reported that from July 2021 through June 2022 there were 2,532 instances of individual book ban requests, which affected 1,648 unique titles by 1,261 authors. Those bans, according to PEN, occurred in 138 school districts in 32 states, representing more than 5,000 schools that have a combined enrollment of nearly four million students.

“Book bans violate the First Amendment because they deprive children or students of the right to receive information and ideas,” explained David L. Hudson Jr., a professor at Belmont University College of Law and a First Amendment law expert.

Both the ALA and PEN agree that the majority of the books being banned are in the young adult category and contain storylines featuring LGBTQ+ issues (674 titles), protagonists or secondary characters of color (659 titles), or directly address issues of race or racism (338 titles).

History of banning books

Book banning has been around as long as there have been books. In colonial America, for example, religious groups often led the charge to ban written content they deemed immoral. In the 1800s, many states in the South had outlawed anti-slavery sentiments, including anti-slavery books. So, the anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin , by Harriet Beecher Stowe, started an uproar. Historian and American History professor Claire Parfait told National Geographic that Stowe’s book was publicly burned. Parfait also shared a story about a free Black minister who was sentenced to 10 years for owning a copy of the book.

According to the ALA and PEN, the most banned book of the past year was Gender Queer: A Memoir , by Maia Kobabe, which chronicles the author’s journey of self-identity and the adolescent confusion of coming out to her family and friends.

So, what is the difference between a book challenge and a ban? According to the ALA, a challenge “is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials.” The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the ALA have outlined a best practice process for the removal of a book from library bookshelves. Challenges, they say, should follow these steps:  filing a written, formal challenge by parents or local residents; forming a review committee, comprised of librarians, teachers, administrators, and community members; and keeping books in circulation during the reconsideration process until a final decision is made. PEN found that 98% of the bans outlined in its report did not follow the best practice guidelines for removal as outlined by the NCAC and the ALA.

U.S. Supreme Court weighs in

The U.S. Supreme Court has only weighed in on the subject of banning books once and the ruling wasn’t definitive because no opinion commanded a majority.

“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) that books may not be removed from library shelves just because school officials find ideas in the books offensive,” says Professor Hudson, who is also the author of The Constitution Explained . “However, the ruling is quite narrow and technically only applies to the removal of books from library shelves.” In other words, the ruling did not address banning books in school curriculum.

The Court’s ruling came in 1982, but the case began in 1975 when a community group in Levittown, NY wanted to remove nine books from library shelves in the Island Trees School District, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Sl aughterhouse-Five  and Langston Hughes’s  Best Short Stories by Negro Writers. Their justification for removal was that the books were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” The school district removed the books.

Steven Pico, a high school senior, and four other students challenged the decision claiming the books were removed because “passages in the books offended [the group’s] social, political, and moral tastes and not because the books, taken as a whole, were lacking in educational value.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the students’ favor, but the decision is complicated.

Writing for a three-justice plurality of the Court and not a majority, Justice William J. Brennan said, “We hold that local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”

Two other justices concurred with Justice Brennan in varying degrees in favor of the students; however, it was not a clearcut decision and many legal scholars still argue about the degree of legal guidance the decision provides.

In one of four dissents in the case, Justice Warren E. Burger wrote, “If the school can set curriculum, select teachers, and determine what books to purchase for the school library, it surely can decide which books to discontinue or remove from the school library.”

Banning books in the Garden State

New Jersey is no stranger to banning books. There have been recent efforts to ban books in Wayne, Ramsey, Westfield, as well as the North Hunterdon-Voorhees School District. Martha Hickson, librarian for North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional High School, pushed back on efforts to remove five LGBTQ+-themed books from library shelves. Those titles included Gender Queer  by Maia Kobabe,  Lawn Boy  by Jonathan Evison,  All Boys Aren’t Blue  by George M. Johnson,  Fun Home  by Alison Bechdel, and  This Book Is Gay  by Juno Dawson. Hickson was determined not to let the books be removed.

“These were highly reviewed books, had won awards, and there was no basis for them to be banned,” Hickson says. “I had worked for 17 years to make this a safe space, fighting for First Amendment rights, for the rights of students to have a safe space.”

Hickson contacted the ALA and other organizations. As a result, a community of alumni, parents, students, and other supporters came to the school board meetings to speak against banning the books. Even as they were subjected to taunts by adults, the students played a critical role in citing the importance of keeping the titles available, says Hickson.

“Their voices were the most powerful,” she says.

Ultimately, the decision was made to keep the five books on the school’s library shelves. Hickson says when parents push to remove books from school libraries, they trample on the rights of other parents and supporters who want the books to be available.

“Students have a right to access a diverse range of stories and perspectives,” Hickson says, and a decision to ban or restrict access to a book can hurt young people who see themselves reflected in those books.

Banning books can also have a harmful impact on educators and librarians who are under constant surveillance, which can negatively affect teaching and learning. The ALA cited 27 instances of police reports filed against library staff. In her case, Hickson says she felt ambushed when she was trolled on social media, received hate mail and physical threats, and her tenure at the school was at risk.

Still, Hickson believes fighting censorship is worth it so other librarians and students know they’re not alone. In recognition of her efforts to fight against banning books, Hickson received the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity from the ALA in June 2022.

In another school district, the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education has made significant changes to its policies regarding banning books. The new policy states that only a student or parent/guardian of a student in the school district can lodge a book challenge.

Elissa Malespina, a board member, as well as a librarian, told nj.com, “We don’t want some random community member that doesn’t have a kid in the school…We want a stakeholder.”

The school district’s new policy also stipulate that anyone challenging a book must prove that it violates the state’s education standards. In addition, challenged books will not be removed while being reviewed.

A new strategy

In Texas, a new legal argument has emerged. While most book bans are challenged on First Amendment grounds, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, claiming that a Texas school district violated Title IX’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex when it removed 130 books from library shelves—at least three-quarters of which featured LGBTQ themes or characters. The Biden Administration has interpreted Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

ACLU attorney Chloe Kempf told The Washington Post that the removals “send a message to the entire community that LGBTQ identities are inherently obscene, worthy of stigmatization, and uniquely deprive LGBTQ students of the opportunity to read books that reflect their own experiences.”

Professor Hudson is not sure the strategy will be successful even though he says it’s a tangible argument. “There does appear to be continuing discrimination against books with LGBTQ themes and topics,” he says.

What students can do

Censorship silences voices and erases life experiences, but Hickson says students can be vigilant to protect their right to read books of their choice. She suggests joining school clubs that protect the right to read; volunteering to attend library, school board, and First Amendment events; and contacting local, state, and federal representatives to urge them to stand against book banning.

Discussion Questions

• To what degree should parents have a say in what books their children have access to? Should a parent, community or school board member be allowed to make those decisions for all students in a district? Does the age of the student make a difference? Explain your answer.
• What do you think of the new policy passed by the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education? Is it a valid expectation that whoever challenges a book is a “stakeholder?” Why or why not?

Glossary Words plurality — having a greater number (as in votes), but not a majority.

This article originally appeared in the winter 2023 edition of Respect , NJSBF’s diversity newsletter.

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America’s unseen book bans: the long history of censorship in prisons

Tens of thousands of books are banned in US prisons, in an often arbitrary process that limits education opportunities

O n a Monday night, just after six, Alisha Williams waits for the last stragglers to take their seats in her cramped classroom at the Washington corrections center. Her students braved western Washington’s fall weather to get here and they enter the room still ruffled from the wind, their khaki uniforms flecked with rain.

There is no rush. Instead of the lesson she planned to teach, Williams will be relying on hastily adjusted notes and on-the-spot explanations. She’d just heard she wasn’t allowed to teach the book her class was scheduled to discuss that night.

The course is English 233, children’s literature. The offending text? All Boys Aren’t Blue, a book recommended for adolescents ages 16 and up.

For many Americans, the concept of book banning until recently brought up images from earlier, more oppressive societies – grainy black-and-white film of Nazi book burning rallies, photos of McCarthy-era crowds exuberantly hurling books and political pamphlets now considered laughably tame on to bonfires.

But in recent years, books have again become a flashpoint in civic discourse, and book banning and censorship in the education system have made a comeback. Nearly every state has seen conflict over school curricula and public library catalogues.

Groups such as the pressure organization Moms for Liberty have scrutinized school libraries, hunting books that examine race or LGBTQ+ issues and demanding their removal. Conservative commentators have dedicated lengthy segments to the purported dangers of certain books, and have persuaded large swaths of Americans that critical race theory, a graduate-level college course, is being widely taught in US grade schools. Video of fistfights breaking out at PTA meetings and tirades during town halls have racked up millions of internet views. Book banning has entered the talking points of political campaigns, infusing the dynamics of everything from city council elections to gubernatorial and presidential debates. School book bans ballooned 33% between 2022 and 2023, according to the Freedom to Read Foundation, a first amendment defense organization. Authors whose books have been targeted include Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and James Joyce.

Few people are aware, however, that book banning is a widespread and longstanding practice in US prisons . Carceral facilities scrutinize what books and magazines can be offered in their libraries, can be taught in their classes or can be mailed to people on the inside.

In many states, the list of banned publications is long. The Florida department of corrections alone has 22,825 books banned from its libraries, according to an October 2023 report by the non-profit PEN America. The Texas department of corrections is second to Florida with 10,265 bans. The Kansas DOC has banned 7,669 books. Virginia DOC, 7,204. By comparison, in the first eight months of 2023, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom received reports of 1,915 attempts to remove books from public, school and academic libraries.

“Even if you accept the premise that there are dangerous books out there, it strains credulity to suggest there are 10 times as many books that are dangerous for adults than there are books that are dangerous for children,” says Anthony Blankenship, an expert on prison policy at the Washington non-profit Civil Survival. “Florida is the worst when it comes to book banning, but every department of corrections is engaged in it. It’s something educators and incarcerated students have to deal with in every state,” he says.

Particularly troubling, according to PEN America, is the arbitrary way book bans are decided upon by some prison authorities, and the lack of clarity about the qualifications of the people imposing these bans. In a statement, the organization noted that employment at correctional facilities requires only a GED or high school diploma, “which means staff empowered to censor books may have only basic literacy themselves”.

A Washington department of corrections spokesperson said that the agency maintained a publication review committee that approves or restricts books. The spokesperson said that the department created a public list of its banned books, and provided reasons for each ban.

All Boys Aren’t Blue is not on this list.

Additionally, the spokesperson said that restricting All Boys Aren’t Blue from use in classrooms was “a joint decision” made by the department of corrections and Centralia College – the college contracted to teach English 233 – “due to the sexually explicit content in this book”. Williams, the Centralia College instructor, disputes this. She also disputes DOC’s claim that the ban could have been appealed.

“In corrections educations,” she says, “there is no appeal process. I don’t even know who is rejecting content or why.”

Williams says she was told by a department administrator that the book had been banned because the department considers any material relating to homosexuality to be problematic.

Curiously, the reason the administrator cites, Williams says, was that some students may be gay themselves, and that the book could create conflict between straight and gay students. She rejects that rationale.

“If we can’t trust that incarcerated students won’t beat each other up over the identity of book characters, what hope is there for rehabilitation and re-entry into society?”

Williams’s English 233 class guides students in a literary analysis of children’s books across a span of several centuries. The course ordinarily opens with a review of the original Grimm fairytales and works its way through contemporary children’s fiction, including a segment on children’s books that some school districts have recently banned.

“One of the biggest topics in children’s literacy is censorship and book-banning,” says Williams. “Part of the class curriculum is developing a sense of one’s own approach to content selection and censorship.”

Williams, an instructor since 2015, says many students “have never seen or read content that has been banned”, and before taking her class assume books are banned only when they contain extraordinarily explicit sexual content or promote racial conflict. After exposure to banned material, students often come to view the bans as absurd.

“The real growth happens when students have to confront material that is likely to cause discomfort and material from voices that significantly differ from the reader’s,” says Williams.

“Talking about censorship without viewing what has been censored is like going to culinary school without ever tasting the food.”

Education opportunities in prison are a key tool in reducing recidivism, says Blankenship, the prison policy expert. “The more [schooling] you have, the more your recidivism drops. By the time you get to a bachelor’s degree the chances of you going back to prison are basically zero. The department of corrections should be bending over backwards to make education accessible and to avoid interfering with it,” he said.

Not only are books critical to prisoners’ education, they can help many incarcerated people heal from the intense childhood trauma that put them on the path toward prison. Introducing prisoners with histories of adverse childhood experiences to trauma-related literature “helps them look within themselves, and gives them a baseline for how to deal with their trauma”, says Rion Tisino, an ethnic minority mental health specialist at the Washington department of social and health services. “It’s almost like a recipe for dealing with trauma.”

Devonte Crawford, a student in Williams’s children’s literature course, spent much of his life in need of such a recipe. At the age of 10, he was sexually assaulted by an older family member, he says, and the abuse went on for several years. It engendered in him what he describes as “a consuming darkness”. “I started to become a very troubled kid,” says Crawford. As a teen he was drinking and taking drugs “to cover the pain and hatred”. He recalls moving to the west coast for a fresh start, only for his destructive behavior to escalate once he arrived. He was soon serving a 30-year sentence for armed robbery.

It wasn’t until he was 26 and in prison that Crawford discovered a trauma-centered program – created and facilitated by other prisoners – and came to see that his trauma was the primary force driving his self-loathing and aggressiveness. Slowly, he began to heal. He wishes he had encountered a class like that sooner.

“I truly believe that had I been able to see or read about someone going through very similar situations then things would be much different today. It would have been incredible to know that I was not alone.”

For people like Crawford, banning books from prison education “stunts the rehabilitative process”, Tisino says. Trauma-centered literature and programs “help you see the root causes of your negative behaviors and … understand how they perpetuate harm. This is the beginning stage of accountability. But when DOC bans literature that contains traumatic experiences, accountability can be difficult for a person to arrive at.”

Alisha Williams wants prison administrators to weigh education outcomes and the potential for emotional growth when determining which books to permit incarcerated students to study. The point of education, she says, isn’t just to increase knowledge. It also builds a student’s ability to see things from the perspectives of others – a skill that books like All Boys Aren’t Blue are designed to develop.

“What’s likely to happen if someone is exposed to this material? I would say the most likely answer is empathy.”

Sam Levin contributed reporting

• US book bans
• US education
• Washington state

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For immediate release | May 15, 2024

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom to benefit from new book of essays

CHICAGO — A new book of essays, “Why Books Still Matter,” inspired by the late First Amendment champion Joyce Meskis, has been released this month, with proceeds going to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF).

Meskis, who owned the celebrated independent bookstore Tattered Cover in Denver, was a fierce opponent of book banning, and 16 luminaries in book-related fields and the U.S. Senate have contributed to the book, which is edited by Karl Weber and published by Rivertowns Books .

“The topics of the essays in ‘Why Books Still Matter’ are some of the most important in our country right now, from freedom of speech and censorship to representation so people can see themselves reflected in books and to build empathy,” said ALA President Emily Drabinski. “We are deeply thankful that the proceeds of the book will be donated to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom to champion libraries in this current landscape of increasing book challenges throughout the country.”

The ALA saw a record 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023, a 65 percent increase from 2022, when 2,571 titles were challenged. OIF tracked 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials and resources in 2023. For additional information about book challenges and how to fight them, visit the Unite Against Book Bans website.

Here are a few of the contributing essayists to the book:

• U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado lauds the mission that Meskis embraced: “The more books we can put in people’s hands, the better the world will be.”
• Nick Higgins and Amy Mikel of the Brooklyn Public Library discuss an award-winning program to make banned books available to young people in communities across the country.
• Civil liberties attorney Steve Zansberg describes a new way to think about the right to free expression and its role in a democratic society.

About the American Library Association

The American Library Association (ALA) is the foremost national organization providing resources to inspire library and information professionals to transform their communities through essential programs and services. For more than 140 years, the ALA has been the trusted voice for academic, public, school, government, and special libraries, advocating for the profession and the library's role in enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all. For more information, visit www.ala.org .

Jean Hodges

American Library Association

Communications, Marketing & Media Relations Office

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Book Bans Are Surging in Florida. So Lauren Groff Opened a Bookstore.

It’s called The Lynx, after the wildcat native to the state. “We wanted something a little fierce,” she said.

By Alexandra Alter

On a recent Sunday, Lauren Groff got out of bed at three in the morning, jolted by a mix of anxiety and adrenaline.

It was opening day for The Lynx, Groff’s new bookstore in Gainesville, Fla., and her mind raced with all that could go wrong. So she drove over to the store, where she felt reassured by the presence of some 7,000 books, a collection she had helped to curate.

“I like being there alone, because I’m surrounded by all of my friends,” Groff, a best-selling novelist and three-time National Book Award finalist, said of the books.

A few hours later, she was no longer alone: By 10 a.m., about 100 people had lined up outside the store to watch as Groff cut the ribbon. More than 3,000 people showed up throughout the day for a series of author readings, folk music, live poetry composition and, of course, to buy books.

Groff and her husband, Clay Kallman, had toyed with the idea of opening a bookstore in Gainesville for more than a decade, but the timing never felt right. Groff’s writing career was taking off, and they had two young sons. But last year, as book bans surged across Florida , they decided that their town needed an independent bookstore where titles that had been purged from libraries and classrooms would be on prominent display.

“This store would probably still be a pipe dream if the book bans hadn’t happened,” said Groff, who has lived in Gainesville since 2006. “I want this for me too. I don’t want to live in a place where we stifle free expression.”

Last fall, they found an old building, a 2,300-square-foot former hair salon, on South Main Street in downtown Gainesville. They transformed it into a bookstore and event space, with a cozy reading nook in the children’s book section, a small cafe and large rolling display tables that can be wheeled away to make way for chairs.

For the front of the building, they commissioned a 60-foot-long mural of a lynx, a wildcat native to Florida , sitting sphynx-like next to the store’s motto: “Watch Us Bite Back.”

“We wanted something a little fierce,” Groff said.

Banned titles are prominently placed at The Lynx. A large display near the front of the store features frequently challenged books across the United States — among them “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood; “Beloved” by Toni Morrison; “Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins; and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson.

Groff also hopes to make The Lynx a place where people will come together to discuss books that are being targeted. Upcoming selections for its Banned Books Book Club include “ Gender Queer ” by Maia Kobabe and “ Flamer ” by Mike Curato.

The store’s mission is also resonating outside of Florida. Since The Lynx opened, it has received about $1000 in donations from around the country. Groff plans to use the funds to distribute free copies of banned titles to Florida residents who might not otherwise have access to them.

“At a time when we in Florida need to speak out against the banning of books and against the restriction of reading, she’s going to have a real impact,” said Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of Books & Books, an independent chain in South Florida, who shared advice with Groff when she was preparing to open the store.

Groff is the latest writer to try her hand at book selling, joining Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, Judy Blume, Emma Straub, Jenny Lawson, Leah Johnson, Jeff Kinney and others.

This January, Groff attended the Winter Institute, an annual gathering of independent bookstore owners, where she got advice from more seasoned booksellers like Straub and Patchett. Straub said she urged Groff to focus not just on the fun parts of running a bookstore, like effusing over books with customers, but also the practical elements, like learning how to manage the point-of-sales system.

“A lot of us authors don’t spend that much time thinking about that part. We think about the books and the community, all of that big picture stuff, and we don’t necessarily think about the nuts and bolts, retail-ness of it,” Straub said. “Like, oh by the way, you need a mop.”

With its focus on banned books and Florida-centric literature, The Lynx could help make Gainesville more of a literary destination — a hub for author readings, book club gatherings and workshops.

For some local authors, The Lynx already feels like an oasis of sorts.

“This place is not only very welcome, but necessary,” said Amy Hempel, a fiction writer who lives in Gainesville and gave a reading on the store’s opening day, as did the Florida authors David Leavitt, Rebecca Renner, Cynthia Barnett and Kristen Arnett.

The Lynx not only provides a gathering spot for book lovers, Hempel said, but also offers hope to residents who have been discouraged by book bans happening across the state. More than 5,100 books were banned in Florida schools from July 2021 through December 2023 — the highest number in the country, according to PEN America.

“The signal it sends to a community, to the whole state, to the country, at a really heated, difficult time, is such a positive,” Hempel said.

Gainesville isn’t exactly a book desert. It is home to the University of Florida, and has a Books-A-Million and a new Barnes & Noble. But it has lost many of its independent shops. One of its beloved bookstores, Goerings , went out of business in 2010, and another longtime independent, The Florida Bookstore, which was opened by Kallman’s grandfather in 1933 , closed in 2016.

“Gainesville has great potential to have a literary community, but we needed a bookstore,” said Alyssa Eatherly, a Gainesville resident who stopped by The Lynx on a recent evening with her friend, Katie Dreffer, to pick up copies of books that were chosen for the store’s romance book club.

“It’s nice to have something that’s not a big chain,” Dreffer added.

As more people trickled in, Groff greeted customers enthusiastically and asked if they needed recommendations or help finding a book.

“Can I show you where the kids’ section is?” she asked a little girl who came in with her mother. “What do you like?”

The girl followed Groff to the children’s area and asked for a book about ancient history.

Groff asked another shopper who was scanning the display tables if she was able to find what she was looking for. “If you see spots we need to fill, let me know, I’m on it,” she said.

A big draw of The Lynx for many readers and customers, of course, is Groff — an acclaimed writer. She has published two short story collections and five novels, among them her 2023 novel, “The Vaster Wilds,” about a girl who flees to the woods from a colonial settlement in the 1600s, and “Matrix,” her 2021 novel about nuns in medieval England.

Part of the appeal of independent bookstores is their careful curation, and booksellers’ ability to recommend titles based on customers’ interests and moods; who better to help you choose your next book than a best-selling novelist who is also a voracious and wide-ranging reader?

Next to the entrance, on a shelf full of bookseller recommendations, Groff placed a few of her own favorite novels with handwritten notes effusing about them, describing “The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard as “a work of sheer genius,” and calling “Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson “legit bonkers brilliant.” (Groff’s husband, Kallman, has only one recommended title on the shelf — Groff’s novel, “The Vaster Wilds,” with a note that says, “It slays.”)

Groff conceded that opening the store and meeting the demands of her own writing career has been exhausting. But she’s not especially worried that selling other people’s books will get in the way of writing her own. She often gets up at 5 a.m. to write and is working on three different books.

“I have four to five hours of writing usually, if I’m not opening a bookstore,” she said.

She plans to be intimately involved in the store’s operations, which will be overseen by the store’s three booksellers and two managers.

“I want to know how to do everything so that I can step in if I have to,” she said.

At the grand opening on April 28, Groff was sweaty and frazzled but buoyed by the enthusiasm of the store’s hundreds of visitors. She got up on an outdoor stage and read from a short story titled “Ghosts and Empties” from her 2018 collection, “Florida.”

Over the course of the day, the store sold 1,011 books, including 56 copies of Groff’s, which sold out. The toilet clogged a few times, and some customers gave up because the cash register line was so long, but otherwise, the mood was celebratory.

“Not a single one of us had a breakdown,” Groff said.

Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times. More about Alexandra Alter