Research Guides: Banned Books Week 2025: Censorship is so 1984: Resources

New York Times Podcast

Links to Resources

Banned and Challenged Books
From privacy education to effective school library programs across the country — ALA advocates have been at the heart of our nation’s greatest advances for libraries. Learn how you can be an advocate for every library across the country.
Banned Book Club
Created by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), The Banned Book Club is an effort to ensure all readers have access to all the books they want to read. The banned books are available to readers for free from the Palace e-reader app.
PEN America Book Bans
PEN America tracks book bans in libraries and classrooms across America in our Index of School Book Bans, updated weekly.
Red Wine & Blue: Book Ban Busters
We are a sisterhood working to change the world together, one suburb at a time. Red Wine & Blue provides everything women need to successfully organize in their communities and beyond.
Unite Against Book Bans
Unite Against Book Bans is a national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship.
National Coalition Against Censorship
We promote freedom of thought and inquiry and oppose censorship. NCAC encourages and facilitates dialogue between divergent voices and perspectives, including those historically silenced.

Report Book Challenges

Advocacy and Activism around Banned Books

Whether by providing legal support, educational resources for parents, teachers, and librarians, or opportunities to organize on the grassroots level, there are many organizations which fight against efforts to ban books in school libraries and beyond, and many more which fight censorship more broadly.

Learn more about some of these organizations, and/or get involved, below:

Video Resources

Banned Books Week YouTube

Celebrity Read-Out Videos

This Talk May Be Banned in Schools | Jonathan Friedman | TEDxKC

How a Book Ban Helped Us Find Our Voice | Christina Ellis & Edha Gupta | TEDxPenn

Get Involved

Unite Against Book Bans is a great resource to help you get involved in your community. Among their resources are guides for speaking up at library and school board meetings, information on how to speak up against censorship, and resources for voters. Additionally, they share articles related to book bans and challenges as they arise. All of these things are free for anyone to access.

Books for All is a campaign through the American Library Association that advocates for wide accessibility of books, especially for teenagers. Here you will find information on their Teen Banned Book Club and a free toolkit to help you start promoting access to books in your community.

The Dear Banned Book Author campaign is an effort to show support to authors whose books have been banned or challenged during Banned Books Week. This campaign encourages both public and private support of authors and even supplies virtual postcards to use when sending along your letter. The goal of this campaign is to raise awareness and spread your love of books to the people who write them. Along the same lines, the American Library Association provides this template letter for anyone to adapt and send to their local newspaper in support of keeping books available.

The Freedom to Read Foundation contains information on court rulings surrounding book bans, information around grants and scholarships, and education resources about book banning and its impacts.

EveryLibrary directly tracks bills that would limit access to books around the United States. On their website, you can find documents of these bills to read as well.