School and public libraries across the United States have banned books at a blistering pace in the last year amid heated political debates about whether young people should have access to certain narratives—particularly those exploring themes of queerness and race. Book banning has been most prevalent in places where conservative politics dominate: Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida are among states with the highest number of bans.
But librarians elsewhere are fighting back. This past April, Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) launched Books Unbanned, which gives teens (Oni Press, 2019) and (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) by George M. Johnson.
