Book banning in US public schools was at its highest level during the 2025-2026 school year, according to a new report by PEN America. PEN tracked 11,982 instances of book banning, with 7,370 unique titles banned. More than 4,500 of those titles had not previously been recorded. The organization reports that 114 school districts—mostly in Florida and Texas—instituted bans. Each of these numbers breaks a dismal record; this is the most instances of books bans, the most titles, the most new titles, and the highest number of school districts since PEN began recording in 2021. The previous high was approximately 10,000 […]
Book Bans
Publishers File Amended Complaint In Iowa Book Banning Challenge
Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the Authors Guild have filed an amended complaint in Penguin Random House v. Robbins, refining their challenge to Iowa SF 496, a book banning law about public school libraries. The case has been litigated since 2023. The complaint will now challenge nine banned books: 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Native Son by Richard Wright; Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult; The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang; Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson; […]
New PEN Book Ban Report Shows Increase in Removals for Nonfiction, POC, and LGBTQ+ Books
Book bans for nonfiction books more than doubled in 2024-2025, according to a new report from PEN America, while removals of books about people of color and LGBTQ+ identities also grew. PEN analyzed 3,734 titles that were removed from schools between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025. The organization found 6,780 instances of book removals from 23 states. While fiction still dominates book bans, the ratio of fiction to nonfiction changed markedly from the previous year. From 2023–2024, 85 percent of banned books were fiction and 14 percent were nonfiction; last year, the fiction percentage fell to 69 percent […]
Book Banners Use AI to Expedite Their Efforts
Parent groups have begun using AI to streamline their book banning efforts around the country, creating content that looks like official book reviews to influence government officials to restrict books, 404 Media reports. Blockade uses OpenAI or xAI’s technology to create book reports for conservative “book rating” websites. The tool searches for words the developers have deemed inappropriate and creates a “risk profile” for the book that can then be downloaded and sent to officials to justify book removals. Blockade purposely takes the flagged words out of context and does not explain its ratings. “The script explicitly defines ‘educational inappropriateness’ […]
ACLU Files Book Banning Suit On Behalf of Vonnegut Estate
The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Utah on behalf of the estate of Kurt Vonnegut; authors Elana K. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins, and Amy Reed; and two anonymous Utah public high school students, over the state’s book banning law. Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, passed in 2022 and amended in 2024, requires public schools and their libraries to remove certain “inappropriate” books or books with any reference to sex. These books include Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, among many other award-winning titles. The plaintiffs write in the complaint that the law […]
SCOTUS Won’t Hear TX Library Case, Upholds Book Bans
The Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal in the Texas book banning case Little v. Llano, upholding a Court of Appeals ruling that sides with the county and allows book removals. In 2021, Llano County officials removed 17 books about race and slavery, LGBTQIA+ identities, and “butt and fart books” from the public library. The bans were overturned and books were protected by two courts, which ruled that government officials could not remove books based on their content. But in May, a full en banc ruling by the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of appeals reversed those decisions, […]