Timed to coincide with the upcoming Banned Books Week and Let Freedom Read Day, October 5–11, PEN America has released its annual report on censorship in public schools. The data further supports the concern, expressed across the book industry and in PW's Freedom to Read issue, that censorship is widening in K–12 classrooms and libraries.
According to the report, “Book censorship in schools has reached a new apex, now becoming a routine and expected part of school operations.” Florida, Texas, and Tennessee lead the nation in banning instances, and “censors have mobilized” against educational materials and events such as textbooks, book fairs, and scholarships.
This is the fourth year that PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, directed by Kasey Meehan, has tracked what it calls the “book banning crisis” nationwide. “This report is a point-in-time snapshot for the year, based on publicly reported information,” Meehan told PW. “It's not going to catch everything,” and there are likely more situations going unreported, she said. “We’re scrambling to get this year wrapped, but at the same time, we're already tracking book bans that started happening this summer and into the 2025-2026 school year. It’s nonstop.”
Between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2025, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans counted 22,180 bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts, and—without lingering on that coincidental “451” statistic—PEN likened the climate to “the Red Scare of the 1950s.” In the 2024–2025 school year alone, “book bans affected 3,752 unique titles in 87 school districts nationwide,” the report said. “These attacks on students’ rights and educational institutions are the symptoms of a much larger disease: the dismantling of public education.”
Compared to the 2023–2024 report, Meehan acknowledged, reported instances of banning were slightly down in 2024–2025, something that could reflect more active resistance to bans. Still, Meehan said, the zest for book banning efforts is not cooling. “We've gotten asked a few questions around ‘is this the tail end of book bans?’” she said. “And honestly, my answer is no. Just as we pushed that report out, we're already tracking cases” such as that of Texas’s newly minted law, Senate Bill 12, which is spurring book removals in Leander Independent School District.
In terms of resistance, the report found "a robust network of advocates fighting back publicly” at the district and state levels. “Of the 87 districts impacted by book bans this year, 70 contained evidence of a public response against censorship, whether from individuals, organized groups, or whole communities.”
Meehan sees promise in state freedom to read acts passed in Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and elsewhere. “Cohorts of state librarians have come together,” she said. “Authors Against Book Bans, PEN, EveryLibrary, the American Library Association, and Penguin Random House have mobilized for pre-emptive protection against book banning. That style of legislation is a powerful tool.”
‘Get Local, Get Vocal’
The Freedom to Read program team characterizes this year’s report as “underlaid by urgency as campaigns, directives, and laws impelling censorship stretch across districts and states,” and on up to the federal level.
According to the findings, 2024–2025’s top banned authors are, in order, Stephen King, Ellen Hopkins, Sarah J. Maas, Jodi Picoult, and manga creator Yūsei Matsui. The year’s top five banned books, also ranked, include A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Sold by Patricia McCormick, Breathless by Jennifer Niven, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas.
If readers are surprised that controversial titles such as Mike Curato’s Flamer, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give aren’t on that list, it’s because they’ve been excised by their foes: “commonly banned books from past years simply aren’t available in many school libraries anymore,” the report notes, and the index “does not count these cases.”
“They’re just gone, permanently,” Meehan said. “We don’t have a perfect apples-to-apples cumulative number, but if books were banned in prior years, it's not like they’ve been returned to the shelves. They’re still banned.” Meehan added that PEN America is preparing another “cover-to-cover analysis” of how people of color, queer people, trans people, race, and gender are represented in banned content, similar to a document released in 2024; that document is expected “closer to November.”
The present report focuses on key trends for the 2024–2025 school year. The Freedom to Read research team found that “persistent attacks conflate LGBTQ+ identities as ‘sexually explicit’ and erase LGBTQ+ representation from schools,” as in the Mahmoud v. Taylor case—which allows parents to opt children out of queer content on the grounds of “religious beliefs”—decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.
In addition, “federal efforts to restrict education use rhetoric from state and local efforts to ban books.” In a conversation with PW, Meehan observed that the rhetoric of White House executive orders parrots “the language that has put pressure first on districts, then has been deployed by your state leaders, like Governor DeSantis in Florida or State Superintendent Ryan Walters in Oklahoma.” Terms such as “anti-DEI,” “anti-trans,” and “anti-woke” arise from local school district battles and are being picked up at the executive level, as well as in corporate and entertainment settings.
Meehan said PEN’s goal, so close to Banned Books Week, is to “keep mobilizing people to show up. We’re encouraging people to find groups that are active at the district or state level, and pushing a ‘get local, get vocal’ message.”
