Banned Books Week

This week, September 18-24, 2022, is Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and highlighting the value of free and open access to information.

Earlier this year, in support of the work of PEN America, Sotheby’s auctioned a specially created fireproof edition of Margaret Atwood’s bestseller and often banned book The Handmaid’s Tale. The book sold through an online auction for $130,000 and a short video captures Atwood torching her book.

More on author/poet/activist Margaret Atwood. Most-challenged book lists from the American Library Association. Poetry’s Place in the History of Banned Books from the Academy of American Poets. A long list of resources for Banned Books Week.

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week starts today, Sunday, September 26, 2021, and continues through Saturday, October 2.

What are you reading? Perhaps it’s time for a title from one of the American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists. ALA doesn’t categorize banned or challenged books by genre, but there are a number of poetry titles on this list of Frequently Challenged Young Adult Books. What will you read next?

Freedom to Read Week

It’s Freedom to Read Week in Canada, which, like Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2, 2021) in the U.S., raises awareness about intellectual freedom and threats to free speech. Visit the Freedom to Read website to find out more about the freedom to read on the north side of the border, including Censorship at the Canadian border, 1985-2020 and Bannings and Burnings in History. What are you reading?

sign of the times

Banned Books Week (September 27 – October 3, 2020) begins today and, along with lists of challenged books and downloadable infographics, the American Library Association (ALA) is offering a variety of items for purchase, including face masks for kids and adults.

what are YOU reading?

It’s Banned Books Week. Learn more about where poetry fits in the history of censorship and find out much more about Frequently Challenged Books with statistics provided by the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association.

what are YOU reading?

It’s Banned Books Week. What are you reading? Here’s a 15-book (or play) introduction to Poetry’s Place in the History of Banned Books and below is an infographic showing last year’s ten most-banned books (click for larger version):

Banned Books Week

September 24-30, 2017, is Banned Books Week, a celebration of the freedom to read. Artist Marta Minujín constructed a monument to that freedom as part of the international biennial art exhibition documenta 14. Originally constructed in Buenos Aires in 1983, A Parthenon of Books was constructed on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, where, on May 19, 1933, some 2,000 books were burned by the Nazis. The artist solicited donations of 100,000 formerly or currently banned books from all over the world for her replica of the Parthenon. Read the story in Dezeen. Read about Minujín’s 2011 book-built Tower of Babel in The Guardian.

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Roman Maerz photography

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week is September 25 through October 1, 2016. There are a lot of resources on the Banned Books Week website and more information, including a list of the top ten most challenged books of 2015, on the website of the American Library Association. At this link you can also add the I READ BANNED BOOKS flag to your Facebook or Twitter profile.

If you’re not sure what to read, have a look at this “Banned Books” article from the Academy of American Poets.

Banned Books Week

Because books matter, and poetry matters, and words shape the ideas at the heart of poetry, and because some people would still prefer that we do not have access to those ideas/words/poems/books, we note and celebrate Banned Books Week each year.

Although challenges are fewer in number, the American Library Association recorded “311 reported attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves in 2014–2015.” Read more from Chris Finan, director of the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE).

Banned Books Week, this year highlighting young adult literature, is September 27 – October 3, 2015.

Visit the PEN American Center website to hear Alex Dimitrov reading “I Am Not” and “Personals Ad” by the much-banned Allen Ginsberg and Deborah Landau reading Walt Whitman’s poems “Leaves of Grass” and “Respondez!” And just in case you’re really in the doldrums, get lost on the island of the banned: Pinterest.

Banned Books Week

Imagine contemporary poetry without Leaves of Grass or Howl. In fact, Whitman and Ginsberg are just two of the poets whose work has been “challenged” with the goal of removing it from libraries, schools, bookshelves, hands and minds.

The freedom to read what we want is not universal. Banned Books Week celebrates that freedom, highlighting the value of free and open access to information and supporting the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.

For more information, visit your local library or bookstore, Banned Books Week online and Banned Books Week on Facebook. See Boynton Blog posts from 2012 and 2013. See a post on “Dangerous American Poets” from the Banned & Dangerous Art seminar the the University of Mary Washington. See a list of Frequently challenged books of the 21st century (through 2013). See planned events state by state. Show your support for the freedom to read by adding a “twibbon” to your social media. Read!