Book Bans Continue to Threaten the Wellbeing of Authors

As I sit down to write this piece, I’m reeling from the news that the Supreme Court might hear a case whose sole purpose is to undo the right to marriage that queer activists fought so hard for. I have a family who thinks I will burn in hell for being gay. I have been told that my queer YA romances will harm teens. The seemingly best candidate for a Democratic presidential run in 2028, Gavin Newsom, has thrown trans people under the bus of fascism. 

And threaded through the fear of all of the above is the specter—more well-formed than phantom, really—of censorship. Since 2020, attempts to challenge, ban, and remove books from school and library shelves have exploded in number. In fact, in 2024, the American Library Association (ALA)’s Office for Intellectual Freedom “tracked 821 attempts to censor library materials and services. In those cases, 2,452 unique titles were challenged.” 

Although those numbers indicate a decrease from 2023’s numbers—likely due to factors such as under-reporting, quiet censorship, or broad legislative restrictions—the ALA pointed out that “the number of documented attempts to censor books continues to far exceed the numbers prior to 2020.” 

When I studied journalism back in the 2010s, I learned about things like impartiality and objectivity. If I were writing this piece in 2015, I would stick to facts and quotes from experts; no personal feelings or Karis interjections. But here’s the thing: I dropped out of my journalism grad program in 2016, and over the past nine years, I’ve learned that good journalism is subjective at times. Because in 2025, we in the US are living under a blatantly fascist government, and it’s actually the duty of journalists to tell that truth. 

This is my offering of truth to the world on the subject of book bans and authors. Because in addition to having studied journalism, I am an author. I have written eight young adult novels and one for adults; more than half of my bibliography is made up of sapphic romances. And I am scared. 

I am scared that once my books are published, they’ll be banned, and I’ll be put on watchlists. I am scared that my books won’t even get bought by publishers because they’re so queer. I am scared. Book bans are having a chilling effect on authors at every stage of their careers, from aspiring ones like me to award-winning, multi-published bestsellers.

Romance author Adib Khorram, whose bibliography includes award-winning and oft-banned YA novels like Darius the Great is Not Okay as well as adult romances including It Had to be Him, said he’s aware that authors of romances geared toward adults are “very sensitive to the creep of obscenity laws.” He mentioned the Miller Test, which determines what counts as obscenity.

“If any mention of sex becomes defined as obscenity, a large percentage of romance novels will be considered ‘obscene,’” Khorram said. “This carries not just concerns about sales, but concerns about legal ramifications. There is a current of puritanism at work in many of these attempts, and we must fight hard to reject it.”

There are societal, financial, legal, and emotional consequences to book challenges, and authors are facing the brunt of these attacks.

Three years ago, I spoke with award-winning author Kyle Lukoff about how book banning attempts were affecting his mental health. I reached out to Lukoff again recently to ask how he sees the fight against censorship progressing—or not. 

Lukoff spoke to the ways things have changed, indicating that events like the inauguration of a second Trump administration and right-wing legislative attempts to broadly censor information have intensified, with authors and reading champions simultaneously rising up to fight those attempts. 

“The right people are being empowered to fight this and also the wrong people have much more institutional power behind them,” Lukoff said. 

He also mentioned a belief in the interconnectedness of the fascism-on-a-government-scale that we are seeing and attempts to ban books, a position that I entirely agree with.

“I think book banning is interwoven with these larger fights around racial justice, around trans liberation, around queer rights, around religious diversity, around anti-Zionism,” Lukoff said. “Book banning is intertwined with…this larger sort of evangelical Christian project of educating children to be loyal to empire. Book banning has its roots in all of those issues, so it neatly encapsulates a lot of ideals that are connected to both fascism and also liberation.”

Lukoff is an author of many picture books and novels for young readers. He’s also a trans man who hasn’t shied away from writing books like When Aidan Became a Brother and Too Bright to See—books where queer and trans children can see themselves. Which means he has been a target of bans and censorship for more than five years, engaged in a fight for basic rights on top of his job as an author.

“[Today], the largest impact that it’s having on me is a kind of detached numbness that I really don’t like,” he said. “I can’t feel anything anymore. I think I’m felt out.”

Lukoff described receiving messages from educators or librarians sharing the consequences they have met as a result of championing books, and added, “The hardest part for me is knowing that the worst thing that’s happening to a person is for me just, like, a Tuesday.”

And he’s not the only author feeling the weight of these five years. Katryn Bury is the author of the Drew Leclair mystery series for middle grade readers. 

“I set out to write Drew Leclair Gets a Clue because when I was a kid, I got the messaging that I was too much—too many marginalizations,” Bury said. “The messaging was, ‘You can’t also be queer.’ So I wanted to write a Nancy Drew-like character that was all those things, but none of those things were the central part of the story.”

After her book was shared on ALA’s 2023 Rainbow List, Bury received reports and read news articles in which Drew Leclair was added to several challenge lists. Bury described the shock of feelings that came from there.

“When I first got the news, I had this run of emotions where I felt like, ‘this is ludicrous,’ and then I did feel this wave of shame,” she said, confessing that for a moment she wondered if the challengers were right, and she shouldn’t have written the books. 

I know the feeling of shame that comes when someone declares the work you’ve done is problematic. In fact, the first time I came out to my family, it was on the heels of an email which expressed grief over the news that my books were queer. It said that my books “could do harm to young readers.” I haven’t even published a book, yet I relate so deeply to Bury’s fear of—maybe they’re right.

“And then…I got so, so mad,” Bury added, though. “I just don’t want kids to have to go through that, because I remember how exhausting it was, to try to mask and fail. I don’t want any kid to go through that.”

It was the reminder I need, too, that this work—the work of writing books, yes, but also of fighting for freedom of information at all levels and in all areas of public life—has resonance far beyond myself.  

Khorram, whose four YA novels have all been challenged or subjected to soft censorship, spoke to the care and concern kidlit authors have for their young readers.  

“If you ask almost anyone who writes for young people, they do it because they care about young people, because they want kids to see themselves in books, because they want kids to have access to literature that’s relevant to their lives, fun, engaging, sometimes educational, and representative of the world they live in,” Khorram said. “So to have people saying that the work I’m doing is harmful to children is really disheartening.”

The tag “groomer” has been applied to many a queer or BIPOC kidlit author (including Khorram) by right-wing agitators, who often go on to be credibly accused and even convicted of crimes against children themselves.

“What I keep getting accused of, they keep getting arrested for,” Khorram said. “I know what I’m about, but it still really sucks to have people call me a groomer.”

Although censorship of kidlit books is often the bigger news item, authors of books for adults—and not just romance authors, but authors of all genres—should be warned that their books aren’t necessarily safe, either. “The book banning movement has been slower to affect many authors of books for adults, though of course there are always exceptions (just ask Art Spiegelman and Jodi Picoult!),” Khorram said. “Nonetheless, if the pace continues, we’re likely to see closures of entire library systems, and that will affect everyone.”

Libraries are invaluable public resources, home to books but also a safe space for children to hang out and a spot where people without WiFi access can connect. If library systems get shut down, we in the US will be much poorer for it.

By now, I’ve filled this article with a lot of really negative things. The piece is kind of a bummer, because, let’s be real—the world is a bummer lately. Which is a very mild and euphemistic way of saying that fascists are running the US and that it is dangerous and terrifying to live here. Authors, as public figures, know firsthand the dangers of being in any way misaligned with the cishet, white, Christian model. Bury even described receiving hate mail that went so far as to single out her daughter, a frightening and invasive missive. 

It’s a scary time, but there are glimmers of hope, of communities banding together to fight back, and of ways that we—authors, readers, citizens who care about children and the right to freedom of information—can join this fight.

Since the spring of 2024, Authors Against Book Bans (AABB) has brought together authors from across the country to join the fight against censorship. In addition to his job as an author, Khorram is one of the National Leaders of AABB, a role he describes as, “a bunch of spiders in the web liaising between all the regional leaders and organizations and connecting people to all the resources they need.”

AABB provides organizing assistance, information, and calls to action, in addition to other resources. These resources include training on things like “how to speak to legislators,” Khorram said. “AABB also partners with lots of other Freedom to Read organizations across the country to share knowledge, resources, and strategy.”

The organization has seen wins in various states in its efforts to enshrine the protection to read legislatively in the US. 

“Even in places like Texas and Florida, AABB members helped stop not all but some of the worst legislation…this year,” Khorram shared. 

And authors aren’t the only ones who can fight back. 

“I see what the right is doing and how they’re mobilizing and I think, ‘we need to be that motivated,’” Bury said. “We need to be showing up at library board meetings, school board meetings, to voice our support for these books…we need to show up for the things we support!”

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a parent of a schoolkid or a daily library patron, Bury added. “If your community is having anything like this, it should not matter if you have kids,” she said. 

That said, if you are a parent of a school-aged child and you, too, feel the frustration that comes with news like this, there are actionable steps you can take. They go beyond attendance at school and public library board meetings, and include active support of librarians and educators. A simple action step can be to write letters to superintendents praising diverse book collections and requesting banned books be stocked on the shelves. And, of course, voting in local elections matters greatly.

“People should vote in their school board elections, vote in their library board elections, they should patronize their school and public libraries,” Khorram said as well. “The public library and the school library are some of the greatest inventions ever. They cost a tiny amount of budget…it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what gets spent on the military or, now, on kidnapping people and sending them to El Salvador. [But] a place where anyone can go and have access to knowledge is one of the most wonderful things about our democracy, and I think people need to fight for that.”

Librarians are already doing so much good work, but Bury did have a request for them as well: Work hard to diversify the books you put in your displays.

“I would love it if more librarians did that deep dive and started supporting not the same 10 books for Banned Books Week every year,” Bury said. “God love Captain Underpants, but that does not need uplifting anymore. I would love it if librarians would…make 25 percent of their selections from authors that are new or not well-known.”

The world is a scary place right now. I’m scared—every day, I battle the fear and despair that threaten to immobilize me. Stories like those of Khorram and AABB; Bury and her librarian colleagues; Lukoff and the countless other kidlit authors who continue to write their stories so well that freedom cannot help but ring—they give me hope.

And so I fight on. I will keep writing my books, keep supporting stories of queer and trans and BIPOC and disabled kids and adults. I am afraid, and I am demoralized, and in many ways I am numb, but the fight marches on, inside of me and in the world.