PEN America
Excerpt: More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature.
“More” is the operative word for this report on school book bans, which offers the first comprehensive look at bans throughout the 2021–22 school year. This report offers an update on the count in PEN America’s previous report, Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights (April 2022), which covered the first nine months of the school year (July 2021 to March 2022). It also sheds light on the role of organized efforts to drive many of the bans.