The new PEN America list of the 52 most banned books in U.S. schools since 2021 exposes a systemic campaign against stories that center race, sexuality, gender, and state violence rather than any genuine concern with “pornography” in classrooms. Between 2021 and mid 2025, PEN America has documented 22,810 individual book bans across 45 states and 451 school districts, signalling a normalization of educational censorship that directly undermines artistic freedom and the right to receive information.

What the new list shows
PEN America’s “Top 52 Banned Books” compiles titles that have been removed or restricted most frequently in U.S. public schools over four school years, led by John Green’s Looking for Alaska with 147 bans and Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes with 142. The list combines award‑winning literature, bestsellers, and modern classics, including works by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Maya Angelou, Khaled Hosseini, Alice Walker, and many prominent YA and LGBTQ+ authors.

Many of these books are cornerstones of contemporary literary education: Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (116 bans) and Beloved (77), Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (106), Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (52), and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse‑Five (59) are all major works in the global canon. The list also reflects the central role of YA and fantasy in current censorship drives, with seven books by Sarah J. Maas and seven by Ellen Hopkins among the most banned titles.

Who and what is being targeted
PEN underscores that the rhetoric of removing “porn” from schools is a pretext: many of the most banned books contain little or no sexual content but instead foreground race, racism, gender identity, queerness, and sexual violence as lived realities. Titles such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (police violence), George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue (Black queer coming‑of‑age), Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer (nonbinary identity), and Susan Kuklin’s Beyond Magenta (trans and nonbinary teens) are systematically targeted because they make marginalized experiences visible.

This pattern aligns with PEN’s broader Index of School Book Bans, in which a large share of removed titles feature protagonists of color or LGBTQ+ characters, or address topics such as racism, migration, and sexual abuse. The bans therefore function as a form of content‑based discrimination, attempting to erase specific communities and social issues from the shared public curriculum rather than applying neutral standards of age appropriateness.

Scale and geography of the bans
The top‑52 list sits within a much larger wave of school censorship documented by PEN’s annual “Banned in the USA” reports. Between July 2021 and June 2025, PEN recorded 22,180–22,810 individual bans in K‑12 public schools, affecting thousands of unique titles and nearly 2,600 authors, illustrators, and translators. The 2023–24 school year alone saw 10,046 bans across 29 states and 220 districts, nearly triple the previous year, while the 2024–25 year still recorded 6,870 bans in 23 states.

The geography of the crisis is increasingly concentrated: in 2024–25, roughly 80% of all documented school book bans occurred in just three states, with Florida, Texas, and Tennessee repeatedly identified as the main drivers. PEN and allied researchers stress that these figures undercount reality, as they do not capture silent removals, bans in public libraries, or unreported cases, meaning the overall scale of educational censorship is likely higher.

Laws, politics, and the erosion of due process
PEN’s reports link the rapid escalation of school book bans to new state‑level “parental rights” and “obscenity” laws that strip away professional review mechanisms and encourage pre‑emptive removals. In states such as Florida and Iowa, broad statutes targeting any material with “sexual content” have enabled officials and activist groups to purge large numbers of books without individualized assessment or transparent procedures. These laws often invert the burden of proof, forcing schools and librarians to justify keeping contested works rather than requiring censors to demonstrate concrete legal harms.

Such measures contravene established international standards on freedom of expression and artistic freedom, which require that any restriction be lawful, necessary, proportionate, and non‑discriminatory. UNESCO has repeatedly warned that using public authority to suppress artistic and cultural works—rather than fostering debate about contentious themes—undermines culture as a global public good and leaves artists and young people without meaningful avenues of protection.

Implications for artistic freedom and cultural rights
From an artistic freedom perspective, the PEN data show how school systems can become an infrastructural censor: by quietly stripping shelves, cancelling orders, and intimidating educators, authorities can effectively prevent large segments of the population from encountering particular narratives and aesthetic forms. These bans do not only affect authors; they shape what future artists, journalists, and citizens are allowed to imagine in the formative period of their lives, narrowing the horizon of possible stories and identities.

The concentration of bans on works by women, people of color, queer and trans authors, and survivors of violence suggests a direct clash with cultural rights frameworks that affirm everyone’s right to participate in cultural life, to access diverse cultural expressions, and to enjoy the arts. For organizations like Mimeta, this moment underscores the urgency of stronger monitoring of cultural censorship, cross‑border solidarity with affected educators and writers, and advocacy that links school book bans to the wider global backlash against artists and cultural workers.

PEN America’s latest data paints a stark picture of educational censorship in the U.S.
More than 22,000 school book bans since 2021 reveal that stories centering race, gender, sexuality, and lived experience are being systematically removed, not to protect students, but to silence perspectives. From Toni Morrison to contemporary YA and LGBTQ+ authors, this trend threatens artistic freedom and young people’s right to access diverse cultural expressions.

#ArtisticFreedom #BookBans #FreedomOfExpression #CulturalRights #Education #Libraries #Writers #YouthVoices

PEN America Exposes School Censorship Crisis

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