PEN America released a memo with preliminary book banning numbers, showing a huge increase in banned titles from the previous school year; Carole Boston Weatherford is the 2024 Young People's Poet Laureate; We Need Diverse Books honored by Library of Congress; and more.

PEN America releases preliminary book ban numbers

More than 10,000 books were banned in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year, according to PEN America’s preliminary findings memo released Monday, September 23.

This total is nearly triple the number from the previous school year when PEN America recorded 3,362 bans nationwide. The final count for the 2023-2024 school year will be released later this fall along with a public Index of School Book Bans. PEN America will also release a detailed content analysis of titles banned during the 2023-2024 school year.

“In part due to the targeting of sexual content, the stark increase includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color,” the PEN America memo said, adding, “Our numbers are certainly an undercount, as stories of book bans often go unreported. These numbers also do not account for the many reports of soft censorship, including increased hesitancy in book selection, ideologically-driven restrictions of school book purchases, the removal of classroom collections, and the cancellations of author visits and book fairs.”

Several titles appear in PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the first time during the 2023-2024 school year, including: Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith; How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan; Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois; Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie; The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan; How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez; Finding Junie Kim by Ellen Oh; Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin; Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver; Puddin’  by Julie Murphy; Blade Runner (do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) by Philip K. Dick; and Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns.

Carole Boston Weatherford named Young People’s Poet Laureate

Carole Boston Weatherford is the 2024 Young People’s Poet Laureate. Appointed every two years by the Poetry Foundation, the title of Young People’s Poet Laureate is awarded to a poet “in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers while working to instill a lifelong love of poetry among developing readers. This two-year appointment comes with a $25,000 annual stipend and additional programmatic funding in support of a project that promotes poetry to young people and their families, teachers, and librarians.”

Weatherford has written more than 70 books, including Kin: Rooted in Hope, illustrated by Jeffery Boston Weatherford, winner of a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Poetry; Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, illustrated by Floyd Cooper, winner of Coretta Scott King Awards for Author and Illustrator, as well a Caldecott Honor; BOX: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom, illustrated by Michele Wood, winner of a Newbery Medal Honor; Gordon Parks: How the Photographer Captured Black and White America, illustrated by Jamey Christoph, winner of an NAACP Image Award; Birmingham, winner of a Jefferson Cup and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award; and The Sound That Jazz Makes, illustrated by Eric Velasquez, winner of a Carter G. Woodson Award from the National Council for the Social Studies.

Reader. Voter. Ready. campaign releases booklist

As part of ALA’s Reader. Voter. Ready. 2024 civic engagement campaign, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) has released “Inspiring Future Voters,” a new booklist for young readers. The list features fiction and nonfiction and is organized into five age categories: birth-preK, K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and YA. The booklists are free to download on the Reader. Voter. Ready. web page.

We Need Diverse Books honored by Library of Congress

The Library of Congress awarded We Need Diverse Books the 2024 American Prize, as part of its Literacy Awards Program. The American Prize is awarded to a U.S.-based organization for "making a significant and measurable contribution to increasing literacy levels" in the country or raising national awareness of the importance of literacy. The honored organization receives $50,000. We Need Diverse Books promotes literacy by increasing access to diverse and inclusive books for young children. Over the past 10 years, We Need Diverse Books has worked with more than 130 published authors, provided career guidance and financial support to diverse college students interning at publishing companies, and worked closely with educators to connect students to the books and authors supported by the organization.

The 2024 David M. Rubenstein Prize (and its $150,000 prize) went to LaundryCares Foundation, which provides early literacy programming for children and families in under-resourced communities. LaundryCares Foundation’s Family Read, Play & Learn spaces can be found in more than 150 laundromats across the country.

The Library of Congress Literacy Awards program honors promising initiatives that provide "exemplary, innovative, and replicable strategies that promote literacy."

BookFest @ Bank Street returns in-person

For the first time since 2019, the Center for Children’s Literature at Bank Street College of Education will host an in-person BookFest @ Bank Street. The annual event devoted to the celebration, discovery, and discussion of books for children and teens will be held Saturday, November 2 at Bank Street’s Tabas Auditorium. It will also be livestreamed by KidLit TV for anyone who cannot attend in person.

Two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry will present the keynote. There will be three panel discussions, including a conversation with award-winning authors/illustrators Rowboat Watkins, Johnny Marciano, Dasha Tolsitkova, Sophie Blackall, Brian Floca, and Doug Salati, who all collaborate and share a studio in Brooklyn, moderated by illustrator Roxie Munro. In addition SLJ’s reviews director Shelley Diaz will moderate a panel with middle grade authors Emma Otheguy, Carlos Hernandez, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, and Karina Yan Glaser; and a final panel discussion will focus on the life and work of Bank Street Graduate School alumna, Robie Harris, whose best-known book, It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, and Sexual Health, has made her among the most banned authors in the country.

A book signing will take place after the event.

Registration is open for both in-person and online BookFest.