The forty-fourth annual Banned Books Week (BBW) takes place October 4 through 10 this year, but given the significant, sustained efforts to restrict what young people can read, Banned Books Week should likely be observed every week. We are living in a time of increased attacks on the free press, free speech, academic freedom, and the rights to read and know. This year’s BBW theme, “Let Books Be: Protect the Freedom to Read,” reflects these concerns.
A recently published five-year report compiled by the American Library Association (ALA), Book Riot, Florida Freedom to Read Project, and the Freedom to Read Project chronicled an explosion of book bans beginning in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The surge was the result of what they called “a full-blown, organized political movement” led by groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Censors have had the most success in Florida and Texas, where state legislatures have passed laws requiring schools to purge their libraries of books that attract complaints from parents. But they have increasingly targeted local school board positions across the country to embed members who advance their censorious policies.
While book challenges were once focused primarily on individual books or authors and were brought by concerned parents or family members acting on their own behalf, the past half-decade shows a shift to sweeping challenges from organized interest groups. These efforts have been successful in red states and beyond, which should alarm anyone who supports the right to read and learn.
According to Betsy Gomez, coordinator of the Banned Books Week Coalition, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom “tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA,” and “713 attempts to censor library materials and services, 487 of which targeted books.” In 2025, the ALA found that “92 percent of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72 percent in 2024” and “less than 3 percent of challenges originated from individual parents.”
Tactics and Targets
Books being yanked off the shelves at schools around the country include a number of acknowledged literary classics such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, usually singled out for their violent or sexual content. But the most challenged books in recent years invariably tell stories about people of color or LGBTQ+ characters.
According to PEN America, public school libraries banned 3,743 unique titles during the 2024–2025 school year. Roughly 44 percent of those titles featured characters identified as people of color. Another 36 percent featured characters identified as LGBTQ+, and some 19 percent of the banned titles dealt with characters depicted as trans or genderqueer. A typical book targeted for featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes is Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a National Book Award-winning young adult novel about two women who fall in love in San Francisco’s Chinatown against the backdrop of the Cold War. According to PEN America, it was banned nineteen times in 2024–25.
Some books have been banned merely for acknowledging that the United States has a past marred by slavery, oppression, and exploitation, or for depicting struggles for social justice. For instance, Veronica Arreola’s J is for Justice: An Activism Alphabet, an illustrated picture book introducing youngsters to social justice activism, was one of nearly 596 titles removed from Department of Defense school libraries earlier this year. It was also removed from a Virginia school library.
Book banning at the K-12 level is bad enough, but increasingly brazen censors are also trying to restrict the sort of books that can be read in college as well. Early this year, Texas A&M University barred a philosophy professor from assigning an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, his famous dialogue about the nature of love, because it allegedly contained “gender ideology.” The University of Nebraska at Kearney announced in June that it would discontinue the textbook Discovering Human Sexuality in courses after fielding multiple complaints from conservative critics, including Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen. The critics particularly bemoaned a training module in the book about empowering transgender students.
Although most of the book challenges around the country in the past few years have been perpetrated by right-wing groups and politicians, not all the titles being targeted are “progressive” or “woke.” For instance, two books by former Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, about Jesus and Ronald Reagan, were removed from shelves in one Florida school district.
These extraordinary efforts to control student access to works about specific academic subjects or marginalized identities are problematic on their own, but a separate challenge exacerbates all of this: declining literacy and interest in reading.
A Decline in Literacy
Ray Bradbury once said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a decline in multiple literacies. As Rose Horowitch noted in The Atlantic, “According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.” The decline was measured across all demographics, including among those most likely to read.
These days, Americans are reading shorter works and more pop culture pap than serious content. When it comes to news consumption, fewer than 10 percent of young people now read a daily newspaper. More than half of adults get news from social media in what media scholars have called news snacking, the misguided belief that important news will just find them while they scroll through their corporate, Big-Tech, algorithmically controlled social media feeds. As Horowitch put it, the United States is in the midst of a “literacy crisis.”
UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf went further, telling The Atlantic that America isn’t illiterate; it’s “postliterate.” The latest research corroborates this assessment. Scholars at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth recently conducted a broad study of more than 5,000 schools in 38 states and concluded that “only five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.”
We have our work cut out for us.
Make America Read Again
One way to fight back against censors and declining literacy is to center the importance of the right to read for civic engagement and the health of our republic. Each year, the organizers of Banned Books Week select several Honorary Chairs to help raise awareness—authors, activists, and students who champion inclusivity and intellectual curiosity, leading by example through their work and teaching. These ambassadors for literacy and intellectual freedom remind us that democracy is stronger when we hear more voices from diverse perspectives and when everyone has access to the insights and ideas that books especially make available. One of this year’s Youth Honorary Chairs is high school senior Marshall Romero, who is also involved in Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). In an interview on the Project Censored Show, Romero observed that
when it comes to a lot of conversations surrounding banned books or media … things happening directly [in] the classroom, there’s not a lot of youth voice or youth perspective on it. Rather, it’s a lot of partisans or parents concerned about what their kids want to learn or what the classroom should look like. … But students are not being considered as stakeholders. … It’s people that haven’t been in the classroom for 30 years. … It’s just been a big hurdle being taken seriously by legislators, but also being able to say, Hey, we’re the primary stakeholder, and you should listen to us.
As a member of SEAT, Romero believes students deserve a seat at legislative and school board tables when decisions that directly impact young people are being made.
Maria McCauley, president of the American Library Association, connected attacks on libraries to broader assaults on democratic institutions. In an appearance on the Project Censored Show, McCauley said that libraries are “foundational to the health of our democracy” and “offer agency and freedom for all of our community members to be able to thrive and flourish.” This is why it is imperative not only to protect libraries and the librarians who staff them, but also to celebrate them, a primary mission of Banned Books Week.
There are many ways for people to get involved during Banned Books Week, including hosting a BBW trivia night (see here for a program kit) or organizing a Right to Read Night, in cooperation with the National Coalition Against Censorship, where people can learn about the most challenged book titles and authors. Project Censored has been a proud member of the BBW Coalition since 2013, and we do our part each year to promote the shared mission of protecting the right to read while fighting censorship in its many guises.
In addition to these efforts, we need people like you, dear reader, to join in the cause. Support your local library and librarian. Visit your local independent bookstore or subscribe to your local news outlet (if you’re lucky enough to have either). Attend school or library board meetings and make it known that censorship has no place in our classrooms or communities. Download the Unite Against Book Bans action toolkit, which features tips about lobbying decision makers, participating in meetings, and organizing protests in support of the right to read. Project Censored also has an action guide for BBW where you can get involved in as little as five to ten minutes. We can stem the tide of book bans and other assaults on our democracy, but we need to work together, and we must do it now.
This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kiley Eriksen.