2024: The Year In Censorship

The steamroller of censorship in 2024 ushered in more school and library book bans along with more censorious legislation. Disputes over Gaza derailed multiple literary events, including PEN America’s annual awards ceremony and book festival, with a steady stream of open letters from the writing community dueling over the appropriate response to the war. And as 2025 nears, authors are among the free-speech advocates organizing against the next wave of anticipated government censorship. 

Intellectual freedom champions scored some victories in the courtroom. They welcomed a federal court’s block of key provisions in a Texas law that would have required bookstores and other vendors to rate all titles sold to schools for sexual content. The court ruled that the law’s ratings were “neither factual nor uncontroversial.” 

In Florida, school district officials in Nassau County settled a lawsuit over their removal of dozens of books they initially claimed ran afoul of state laws on obscene content. The children’s book And Tango Makes Three went back on shelves, as did Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jason Reynolds’ All American Boys. Moving south to Escambia County, officials returned 24 books to shelves as a larger lawsuit continues over indefinite “review” of more than 100 titles. 

Still, lawmakers persist. In Utah, the first list of 13 books banned statewide from all schools dropped in August, including Judy Blume’s Forever and multiple titles in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series. A new law requires any books deemed offensive by three of the state’s 41 school districts to be removed from all schools. Tennessee legislators passed new statewide regulations expanding restrictions on books with nudity and sexual content. Knox County schools cited the changes in its December list of books banned district-wide, including the graphic novel edition of Ransom Riggs’ bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. 

When it reconvenes in January, the Texas legislature will consider a proposal to shift vetting of books from local school boards to the state Board of Education. The state board voted 10-2 to approve the idea at its November meeting, where one member, fresh from approving a Bible-infused reading K-5 curriculum, opined that local school boards would be “delighted” to have the state take over book ratings.

A lawsuit over book removals from the public library in rural Llano County, Texas, is still pending in federal court. The case attracted national attention and plenty of donations, ostensibly to help pay legal fees for the county, although none of the money raised appears to have actually been used for its defense, according to reporting from the Austin American-Statesman. 

Public libraries also continue to face threats. After Idaho lawmakers passed a bill with financial penalties for school or public libraries that allow teens under 18 to access some sexually explicit content, one public library received multiple online threats. The threats included arson and started flowing after the library displayed frequently-banned graphic novel Gender Queer. A suburban Chicago public library hired private security after ongoing threats forced temporary closure of the branch. A Pennsylvania library canceled a planned drag queen story time program after bomb threats. 

The latest statistics bear out concern that censorship is increasing. PEN America’s most recent tally counted 10,000 instances of book banning in schools, triple that of last year.  Florida and Iowa had the highest number of reports. Censors often targeted books by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ people, or those featuring any mention of sex, regardless of context. Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes topped PEN America’s list due to a single page that mentioned date rape. “There was nothing gratuitous about it. It’s not porn,” she said of her 2007 novel, which chronicles a school shooting. 

PEN America weathered an abundance of criticism this year over its response to the war in Gaza. In January, Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar and others disrupted a PEN America event with Big Bang Theory actress and Israel supporter Mayim Bialik, who was moderating a conversation with comedian Moshe Kasher about his newest memoir. Security removed Jarrar and her fellow protesters.

The nonprofit canceled its annual awards ceremony after nearly half the nominees dropped out, charging that the intellectual freedom nonprofit had neither done enough to call attention to the plight of Gazans nor condemned Israel forcefully enough. Cancellation of its World Voices Festival, originally slated to include a tribute to former PEN America president Salman Rushdie, soon followed. Advocacy group Writers Against the War on Gaza also called for an overall PEN America boycott, demanding the removal of CEO Suzanne Nossel and a commitment to academic and cultural boycotts of Israel.

Nossel resigned Oct. 31 to become head of Freedom House, a nonprofit devoted to elevating democracy. She said her departure was not related to the criticism.

PEN America was far from the only place where the literary community clashed over Israel and Gaza. Some Palestinian writers saw event invites evaporate, prompting the Publishers for Palestine group to chronicle incidents of censorship. Multiple writers who expressed support for Israel (and even some Jewish writers who didn’t) saw their Goodreads reviews tanked and book events canceled under the umbrella of anti-Zionism. 

One high-profile incident involved a planned panel at the Albany Book Festival that dissolved after one panelist questioned moderator Elisa Albert’s statements about the war. Albert said festival organizers told her two writers refused to appear on the panel with a Zionist. Those writers tell a different story, according to an open letter published on LitHub. Novelist Lisa Ko said she never used the word “Zionist” nor refused to be on the panel, and that she and Aisha Abdel Gawad only expressed concerns about Albert’s public rhetoric. Gawad lost her post as writer-in-residence at Connecticut’s Wilton Library over the incident. 

In the fall we noted that intellectual freedom advocates had concerns about Project 2025. Those fears have escalated with President Trump returning to office in a few weeks. Recent analyses of the proposal by EveryLibrary Institute and Authors Against Book Bans note the proposal would stoke anti-library fervor and expand book banning and curriculum censorship.

“I mean, it’s extreme from page one, but you only get five pages in before, as an author, you look at it and go, ‘Oh, I see they’re coming for us,” author Maggie Tokuda-Hall said in an interview on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast. 

Tokuda-Hall is a co-founder of Authors Against Book Bans, which issued a Nov. 25 open letter to the CEOs of more than 90 publishers asking them to make plans to protect authors and their books. Among the asks: Continue to acquire and promote works by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color, guarantee the confidentiality of any author’s private information who might be targeted under a Trump immigration ban, and provide security and legal aid for authors as needed. 

“It’s imperative that publishers, like authors, do not obey in advance,” the letter reads.