Blockbuster author John Green is rallying supporters around a high school teacher in Marion County, Kentucky who has been publicly attacked for teaching Green’s book Looking for Alaska in a 12th grade English class. A letter from at least one…
Author: Maren Williams
VICTORY in Virginia: Governor Vetoes Classroom Censorship Bill
In a victory for the freedom to read, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe today vetoed a bill that would have required public schools to notify parents of “sexually explicit content” in curricular materials. The bill arose from one parent’s attempt to…
Franco-Syrian Cartoonist Struggles to Process Hebdo Attack, International Affairs
Riad Sattouf, Franco-Syrian creator of the universally lauded graphic memoir The Arab of the Future, is an uneasy symbol of the intercultural tensions currently roiling Europe and the Middle East. A longtime contributor to Charlie Hebdo and until 2014 the…
Krug Fund Offers Scholarships for Online Intellectual Freedom Course
The Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) are pleased to announce a partnership to offer an online graduate-level course on intellectual freedom for library and…
Egyptians Speak Out for Ahmed Naji and Free Expression
Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji remains in prison pending an appeal of his conviction for “violating public modesty” with an excerpt from his book Use of Life. A few brave government officials, including Minister of Culture Helmy al-Namnam, have spoken out…
Police Demand Removal of Denver Student’s Art
Police associations and others successfully demanded the removal of a Denver 10th-grader’s artwork from a public building this week. The drawing shows a police officer in a Ku Klux Klan hood aiming a gun at an unarmed black youth with…
Ohio Middle School Student Suspended for Death Note Cosplay Prop
An Ohio middle school student’s Death Note cosplay was a little too authentic for school officials, who recently suspended her for three days after a teacher found her prop “death list” notebook with other students’ names inside. The girl was…
UN Committee Urges Japan to Ban Sexual Violence in Fiction
Just a few months after a UN envoy recommended that Japan ban certain types of manga and anime to somehow protect real children from abuse, a separate UN committee has now entered the fray by urging the government to ban…
Florida Classroom Censorship Bills Gone–For Now
Good news! Two bills in the Florida legislature that would have facilitated challenges to instructional materials were allowed to die at the end of the legislative session earlier this month. The bills had been pushed by some of the same…
Horror Comics Blamed for 1950s Scottish Vampire Panic
The year was 1954. The location: Glasgow, Scotland’s Southern Necropolis, a massive graveyard harboring over 250,000 sets of mortal remains. Over a span of three nights that September hundreds of children under the age of 14 reportedly assembled there with…