Overview
- PEN America reports 6,870 instances of book bans in the 2024–2025 school year, affecting 3,752 unique titles across 87 school districts, with most cases in Florida, Texas and Tennessee.
- The updated 50 Most-Banned Books list places John Green’s Looking for Alaska at No. 1, with 147 bans since tracking began in 2021.
- Other frequently removed titles include The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, The Color Purple, The Kite Runner and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
- PEN America says recent federal executive actions have been invoked to remove books, including from military base libraries, and to advance broader efforts to censor education.
- Kasey Meehan warns that pulling widely read, critically recognized books harms students, while John Green calls the trend disappointing and scary and rejects efforts to decide what other families’ children can read.