PEN America Warns Book Bans Are Costing Authors—and Communities

Book bans aren’t just quietly reshaping school and library shelves. They’re gutting author incomes, chilling what gets published, and draining opportunity from entire communities, PEN America warns in a new analysis of censorship’s mounting price tag.

Since 2021, the free-expression group has documented nearly 23,000 instances of books being pulled from U.S. public schools—many focused on race, gender, and LGBTQ+ lives. That “disturbing normalization” of censorship, detailed in PEN’s latest national report, is now rippling through the careers of the people who write and illustrate those books.*

The Hidden Bill for Authors and Illustrators

In a new feature, PEN America spotlights creators whose work has been repeatedly targeted—often with no media attention and no sales bump to offset the damage.

Picture-book team Sarah and Ian Hoffman once thought a ban might boost visibility. When their title Jacob’s New Dress, about a gender-nonconforming child, was pulled from a North Carolina district years ago, they landed a New York Times interview. But as bans surged, three more “Jacob” books were challenged and vanished from schools without fanfare.

Children’s author Sarah Brannen says three schools canceled visits after learning she wrote Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a picture book about a gay marriage that later stood at the center of a Supreme Court case. She ultimately “gave up” on school visits altogether—work that can make up a quarter or more of a children’s author’s annual income.

Other creators, like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea author Maggie Tokuda-Hall and prolific writer Robin Stevenson, describe a sharp drop in festival invitations, library events, and sales for titles featuring queer characters or histories. Illustrator Andy Passchier says their income plunged “from enough to survive to almost zero” in a single year as LGBTQ+ books drew more scrutiny.

“Book banning is also connected to a larger suspicion of public education, the defunding of which also impacts my ability to earn a living,” says author Kyle Lukoff, whose multiple award-winning titles have been banned across several states.

From School Boards to Prisons: A Wider Censorship Web

PEN America’s broader data shows Florida, Texas, and Tennessee continuing to dominate school book removals in the 2024–25 year, with thousands of titles challenged or taken off shelves.* In some districts, entire categories of books—anything touching on LGBTQ+ themes, Black history, or sexual health—now face heightened vetting or de facto blacklisting.

Those trends echo stories readers have seen in recent cases, from a teacher in Oklahoma losing her license after sharing a QR code to banned titles, to new laws and local fights across the South and Midwest that have turned librarians into targets. Our earlier coverage of nearly 23,000 school bans framed this as a “new era of censorship” in education; PEN’s latest look adds the stark financial fallout for the people making the books.

And the pressure is not limited to schools. Earlier this week, Arkansas officials moved toward banning almost all physical books from state prisons as a supposed anti-drug measure, sparking national outrage and raising alarms about cutting off access to literature for incarcerated people.*

Pushback, Unbanned Networks, and What Readers Can Do

Even as bans climb, resistance is coalescing. Advocacy group We Need Diverse Books recently launched the Unbanned Book Network, which works with publishers and donors to ship banned and challenged titles directly into schools and classrooms that have lost them.* This fall’s Banned Books Week (Oct. 5–11) is expected to double down on highlighting authors whose work has been systematically removed, from YA staples to frequently challenged classics like A Clockwork Orange and Sold.*

For readers, the stakes go far beyond one controversial title. Book bans shrink the range of stories a community can access, starve schools and libraries of the very books that reflect their students, and send a message to marginalized authors that their livelihoods—and lives—are expendable.

PEN America is urging supporters to donate, testify at school board meetings, and press lawmakers to pass “freedom to read” protections ahead of the next legislative wave. For book lovers, the most immediate response may be simple: seek out banned and challenged titles, support the authors behind them, and keep their stories circulating—on your shelves, in your libraries, and in the hands of the next reader.