PEN America reports record 12,000 book bans in US public schools

Texas accounted for 8,100 of the removals, the report said

US public schools recorded nearly 12,000 book bans during the 2025-2026 school year, the highest single-year total since the free-expression non-profit PEN America began tracking removals in 2021, according to a report the organization released Monday.

The removals pushed PEN’s cumulative total since 2021 to roughly 34,000 instances. The report covers bans enacted across 114 school districts during the school year, which PEN described as “the highest number ever for a single year.”

Texas led the country with more than 8,100 bans, a surge the report tied to the state’s SB13 law, which bars extensive categories of books in schools. Florida, which had topped the list for the previous three years, fell to second.

PEN’s analysts said new state-level censorship laws accounted for much of the national increase, working in conjunction with artificial-intelligence tools that, according to the report, remove an expansive number of titles.

The report counted more than 7,000 unique titles, involving more than 4,000 authors, illustrators and translators. Fiction accounted for more than 90 percent of the young-adult titles on the banned list.

The most frequently banned single title was “Sold” by journalist Patricia McCormick, a young-adult novel about a Nepali teen who is sold into sexual servitude. Stephen King was the most banned author for the second consecutive year.

In a statement released by PEN America, McCormick said she was angry on behalf of the women she interviewed for the book. “Mostly I feel angry on behalf of the women that I interviewed for the story: young women who’ve been sold into sexual slavery, who told their stories so the world could know what was going on,” she said. “To hear people, or book banners, say that their accounts are pornographic is so disrespectful to them.”

McCormick also said the bans were “really disrespectful to the students who seek out that book.” “There are kids who need a book like that because they have some kind of sexual exploitation experience in their own life,” she said, “and there’s something about reading a story about someone who’s six degrees away from you – a girl in Nepal – that inspires a certain amount of empathy and understanding that you might not have for yourself.”

Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said “when reading for pleasure is in decline across all ages, bans on popular and engaging titles are exceptionally tragic.” Meehan also said in the statement that “schools should be doing everything possible to connect kids with reading by introducing them to engaging stories and formats.” Instead, Meehan added, “many are doing the opposite, banning books that help kids see themselves in literature, deepen their understanding and empathy of others, and develop their imaginations.”

The report noted that parents, students and educators have pushed back against the conservative turn in many school districts, including through school-board elections. Progressive school-board candidates, the report said, bested many rightwing candidates in many Florida elections this year.