Nearly All of the Record 12,000 Books Banned This Year Were in Texas and Florida

[Jessica_Rose ✅]

Nearly All of the Record 12,000 Books Banned This Year Were in Texas and Florida

https://www.them.us/news/book-bans-record-texa-sflorida 🔗

Mathew Rodriguez (8 Oct 2026)

Public schools banned nearly 12,000 books during the 2025-2026 school year, according to a new report released from PEN America, a group dedicated to freedom of expression for writers. That represents the highest number of bans in a single year since PEN started tracking them in 2021.

The 11,982 bans represented over 7,000 unique books — also a record number of titles prohibited in one year. Over 4,500 of the titles this year were brand new to PEN's ban list, also a record for number of new titles added in a single year.

Two states were responsible for almost all of the nearly 12,000 bans: Schools in Texas banned 8,193 of them, while Florida accounted for 3,212. As noted by PEN, Texas's new place atop the list — Florida had previously led the list of bans for three straight years — comes after the passage of Senate Bill 13, a law that banned broad categories of books in the state, including anything that contains "harmful material" or anything that is "pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable." The law, passed under the guise of parental rights, went into effect in September 2025.

As has been true in the past, the majority of banned books deal with issues such as race and racism, LGBTQ+ people and identity, people of color, and sexuality.
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@Sarah B

[Lori Dee ✅]

Books have been censored by authoritarian dictatorships to silence dissent, such as the People's Republic of China, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.

The United States of America has entered the chat.

[Petunia]

Ahhhh. This is why the Epstein files haven't been released. 

"Pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable."