A unanimous committee vote kept Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved on a summer reading list in a Satellite High School in Florida despite a parent’s complaint over what he is calling the “porn content” of the novel. Hamilton…
Upset over the graphic nature of a passage in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a parent in Knoxville, Tennessee is taking her complaint to the district level and attempting to have the book removed from all local county schools.…
When former librarian Kelly Jensen heard about the removal of Some Girls Are from an optional high school summer reading list in Charleston, South Carolina, she took the knee-jerk reaction to appease an upset parent as a call to action.…
Earlier this summer, a unanimous vote successfully kept Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in Buncombe County, North Carolina, classrooms and initiated a necessary discussion about whether existing school policy about how to handle challenged books should be changed. In a…
In 2012, Captain Underpants topped the American Library Association’s most frequently banned book list for its “unsuitable” content. It popped again as the #1 most banned book in 2013 for offensive language and violence. In light of the numerous challenges…
From exorbitant fines to charges of “socioeconomic discrimination” to threats from ISIS, cartoonist Xavier Bonilla, best known by his pen-name Bonil, and his work have been frequent targets of the Ecuadorian government. As we learn in a recent interview with…
In a recent poll done by Japanese website Goo, Keiji Nakazawa’s semi-autobiographical manga anti-war Barefoot Gen ranked number one as today’s most “traumatizing” manga. The poll asked readers to rank the top 28 manga that left an indelible emotional impression…
Twitter called it #hairgate, but award-winning author Margaret Atwood said it was outright censorship when her column about Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hairdo was pulled from the National Post site last month. In what quickly escalated to blitz of…
Banned Books Week is coming, and The Guardian has collected some quotes from authors, novels, and activists meant to inspire you to stand up for the right to read! One of the biggest obstacles faced by educators and authors is…
Morocco is a country abound with cartoonists who are using the art of satire to address a variety of social issues and injustices. But it is also a country with a deep recent history of governmental censorship and oppression. Amidst…