PEN America tracks 11,982 school book bans, a new record

Four years of record-keeping, four years of records falling. PEN America's new report puts last school year at the top of a list no one wants to top: 11,982 instances of book banning, the most since the organization began tracking in 2021.

Behind that headline number is a detail that should worry you more than the total. Of the 7,370 unique titles banned, more than 4,500 had never been flagged before. That's not the same old target list getting recycled district to district — it's new books, new authors, new reasons to object, growing every year. If you published something in the last school year that deals with race, gender, sexuality, or history that makes some school boards nervous, you are now part of a pool that's expanding, not shrinking.

The geography matters too. PEN counted 114 school districts instituting bans, concentrated mostly in Florida and Texas. If you have a school visit, a book fair order, or a library purchase pending in either state, don't assume last year's clearance holds this year. Policies are moving faster than catalogs can keep up.

Here's what I want you to actually do this week. Pull up your own backlist and ask: does anything I've written fit the profile that's been getting pulled — LGBTQ+ characters, racial history, sexual content, even mild profanity? If yes, don't wait for a district to tell you. Check whether your publisher or distributor tracks state-level challenges, and ask them directly whether your title appears on any watch lists in Florida or Texas specifically. Most publishers won't volunteer this. You have to ask.

Second: if you have school or library events scheduled, confirm with the host district now, not the week of. A title that was fine in spring could be reclassified by fall, and you don't want to find that out when you're already standing in the parking lot.

Third, if you're an author whose work has been or could be banned, PEN America itself is a resource — they track this specifically so authors and librarians can see patterns before they get caught in them. Knowing your title's status isn't paranoia, it's just current information in a landscape that's moving.

None of this means stop writing what you write. It means stop assuming the ground is stable under a backlist that was published into a very different set of rules. The record wasn't set once. It's been set four years running. Plan like year five follows the same line.