Georgia Teens Turn Reading Bowl Into Protest Over Book Ban

In Georgia, a student reading competition designed to spark a love of books has become an unexpected front line in the fight over censorship. The Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl quietly pulled eight young adult titles from its 2025–2026 high school list after “numerous reconsideration requests,” including a novel about book bans themselves—prompting teens to push back.

Beloved Reading Bowl Narrows Its Shelf

The Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl has been a staple of Georgia’s school library culture since 1986, built around Georgia Book Award and Georgia Peach Award nominees. Students voluntarily read a slate of titles and compete by answering questions, turning reading into a team sport instead of a homework assignment.

This year, though, the steering committee removed eight of 20 YA books from the high school list after reconsideration requests. All were published for teen readers, and seven of the eight are by women, with at least five by authors from marginalized backgrounds. One of the pulled titles is by Samira Ahmed and explicitly tackles the current wave of book bans, a move that highlights the irony at the center of the controversy.

Many of the removed books deal with themes frequently targeted by censors nationwide: mental health, sexual assault, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. PEN America has documented 6,870 school book bans in the 2024–2025 year alone, with Georgia among the states seeing books “systematically removed” from shelves, especially titles about race and LGBTQIA+ lives (PEN America via GPB).

Student Pushback and a Bigger Censorship Pattern

Georgia students aren’t taking the Reading Bowl decision quietly. At Wheeler High School, teens launched a petition demanding transparency around why the books were pulled and who lodged the complaints. Their organizing echoes broader youth-led resistance to school book bans across the country.

The Reading Bowl clash also fits a statewide pattern. In Cobb County, Superintendent Chris Ragsdale has overseen the removal of more than 30 titles by early 2025, many tagged as “divisive” or LGBTQIA+, according to local reporting. Georgia library systems have tightened their challenge procedures as well, limiting who can contest books and how, even as national authors—everyone from Sarah J. Maas and Stephen King to Ellen Hopkins—recur on banned lists.

The Reading Bowl has already felt this chill: Cobb County canceled its 2023 event “out of an abundance of caution” amid book-ban controversies. Now, with optional competition titles under pressure, students who volunteer their free time to read are watching their choices shrink before they even reach the shelves.

For book lovers, this isn’t just an inside-baseball story about one state program. It’s a test case for whether community reading initiatives can still champion diverse YA books in an era of aggressive challenges. As PEN America’s data and Georgia’s recent history show, what happens in a single reading bowl can signal which stories teens are allowed—or not allowed—to encounter next.