Poets & Writers Theater

In this event from the 2024 Atlantic Festival on the topic of books bans in the United States and the world, Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman moderates a discussion with Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association, and Victoria Scott-Miller, owner of Liberation Station Bookstore, as well as a discussion with Iranian American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad and author and activist Rania Mamoun.

“Censors never go after books unless kids already like them.” In this 2011 video for Banned Books Week, frequently censored author Judy Blume speaks about the negative effect that book banning has on children.

In this video, PBS Books and the American Library Association’s Booklist Reader editors recommend their top twelve books for this summer, which include James by Percival Everett (Doubleday, 2024), This Strange Eventful History (Norton, 2024) by Claire Messud, State of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) by Laura van den Berg, and One of Our Kind (Knopf, 2024) by Nicola Yoon.

In this CBS Sunday Morning video, correspondent Martha Teichner speaks with the founders of the activist group Moms for Liberty, library officials, a teacher removed from her classroom for giving her students access to banned books, and Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, about the fight over banning books. This week, the American Library Association released its annual list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books.

"Censorship is the enemy of truth." Bill Moyers discusses what books and libraries have meant to his life, and expresses his dismay and frustration over the prejudices that motivate others to ban books.

At this year's American Library Association conference, held June 27 to July 2 in Chicago, novelist Ann Patchett, whose most recent book is State of Wonder (Harper, 2011), talked about her "profoundly uninteresting" life as a reader and opening an independent bookstore, Parnassus Books, in Nashville.