In a report released today, PEN America officials said that the organization has counted more than 10,000 cases of book censorship in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year, nearly triple the number from the previous school year, when PEN America recorded 3,362 bans nationwide. PEN officials said that new state-level rules and legislation are the key drivers of the bans, with nearly 8,000 book bans recorded in Florida and Iowa, where two sweeping new laws have broadly targeted books that contain any sexual content.

Among the report’s key findings, PEN America researchers found that, as in previous years, books were “targeted for including diverse perspectives,” with banned books “overwhelmingly” featuring stories with people or characters of color and/or LGBTQ+ people. The organization also observed an increase in book bans targeting “stories by and about women and girls and/or that include depictions of rape or sexual abuse.”

PEN officials write that “a vocal minority of groups and individual actors” espousing “parental rights” rhetoric continues to ramp up the pressure to ban books, and said that state legislation was “particularly critical" in accelerating book bans, by “making it easier to remove books from schools without due process, or in some cases, without any formal process whatsoever.”

Such state legislation cited by PEN America include:

  • Iowa’s SF 496, which took effect July 2023, and prohibits works with any description or depiction of a “sex act,” as well as “Don’t Say Gay” copycat provisions censoring discussions of LGBTQ+ identities in the classroom.
  • Florida’s HB 1069, which requires that any book challenged for “sexual conduct” must be removed during the review process and has been linked to a significant rise in book bans during the 2023-2024 school year.
  • Utah's newly enacted HB 29, which has resulted in the banning of 13 books statewide as of July 2024
  • South Carolina's Regulations 43-170, passed this summer, which prohibit books with sex-related content and give the state Board of Education power to ban books statewide.
  • Tennessee’s HB 843, whch expands the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 and now requires schools to remove books that contain nudity, “excess violence,” or sex-related content and empowers a state commission to review and ban books statewide.

PEN reps said the final count for the 2023-2024 school year will be released later this fall, along with a public Index of School Book Bans and “a detailed content analysis” of titles banned during the 2023-2024 school year, ended June 30, 2024.

PEN America's report, which comes as Banned Books Week 2024 gets underway, appear to stand in contrast to the American Library Association's preliminary data, also released this week, which found that that the number of tracked challenges has fallen significantly for the first eight months of 2024. The ALA reported 414 tracked challenges to censor library materials in the first eight months of 2024, down from 695 challenges during the same period last year.

ALA reps said the decline likely reflects the success of advocacy efforts—including efforts by individual librarians, key wins in several lawsuits, and efforts including the ALA's Unite Against Book Bans—but noted that censorship efforts remain far above levels tracked prior to 2020, when an organized political movement first began taking aim at books and materials in schools and libraries.