When PEN America emailed me, I was excited. The organization, whose mission is to protect the freedom to write, was looking for volunteers to code banned books.
The goal was clear: Identify what types of information and representation are being targeted by censors. Armed with that knowledge, PEN can send advocates for free expression and diversity to talk to parent groups, school boards and city councils, to fight to keep books on school and library shelves.
I’m a writer. I believe no book should be banned. There are plenty I wouldn’t recommend but rarely because of the content.
Not every book is right for all ages, but that is no excuse to keep readers away from good books and good authors, not to mention classic works and great authors. The purpose of reading is to open us to new things, to meet characters we would never know otherwise, to discover cultures and whole worlds we cannot imagine. Sometimes that’s disturbing, intense or difficult. Sometimes it makes you think. Thinking is a good thing.
In PEN’s training session, it broke my heart to discover how many book bans have been documented. In 2023, a new record was set: 4,349 bans from July through December, across 23 states and 52 public school districts, more bannings than PEN documented in all of the 2022-23 school year.