The science is certain: Reading engenders empathy. If it’s true that books bring about compassion and a curiosity about the world, ideas, and people different from oneself, then it’s also true that banning books is designed to narrow, not widen; to indoctrinate rather than foster exploration and free thinking. Banning reading, then, is an act intended to engender ignorance.
Let’s go a step further: Banning books is not about protecting children or preventing grooming or any of the other hackneyed excuses banners give for challenging titles. Banning books is about consolidating power. It’s about demagoguery, further marginalizing minority voices, and paving the way to fascism.
According to data from the American Library Association’s 2025 State of America’s Library Report, in 2024, there were 821 attempts to censor library materials, which included 2,452 unique titles. This was the third highest number of books challenged in a year since ALA began tracking in 1990. Emboldened by a sympathetic administration, book banners are ramping up efforts all over the country to censor books and take away the right to read.
Now, more than ever, it’s time to fight back.
Authors Against Book Bans is one of the leading organizations working to do just that. The organization of more than 5,000 authors, illustrators, anthology editors and creators, and other book creators works to provide resources and education for authors whose books have been banned, as well as general advocacy and awareness regarding book bans for the public at large. I recently spoke over Zoom with Chicago author Samira Ahmed, one of the national leaders of Authors Against Book Bans. Ahmed, whose own novels have been challenged, and who herself has been protested and faced threats at her events, is the author and editor of more than a dozen titles, including the YA novel, This Book Won’t Burn, about a young woman who moves to a new town, is shocked to find her local library has been the victim of book bans, and decides to fight back. Ahmed latest novel, The Singular Life of Aria Patel, publishes May 13, 2025.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Greg Zimmerman
How would you characterize the current state of book bans? Are organized groups like Moms for Liberty still gaining momentum, or is their influence waning at all?
Samira Ahmed
Book bans and censorship are gaining momentum in a rapid-fire way. Bans are really morphing from Moms for Liberty into something that we’re seeing at our highest levels in Washington D.C. Recently, the Naval Academy removed from their shelves, anything relating to queer, trans content, DEI, or CRT. They removed Ibram X. Kendi’s books but left Mein Kampf.
We’re also seeing so much legislation coming out to ban books, to censor books, to remove content, not just from school libraries, but from public libraries now too. It was a movement that started with schools but has become so much bigger and expansive. It’s just a five-alarm fire right now. But luckily, there are a lot of us who are “all hands on deck” trying to put this fire out, because book banning is fundamentally anti-American. It’s fundamentally anti- freedom, no matter what the book banners say.
But, we really are trying to fight this on many, many fronts. And it’s obviously not just Authors Against Book Bans. It’s the ALA, and there are lots of local grassroots organizations like the Freedom to Read projects in Texas and Florida, which are doing incredible work in states where they have an uphill battle, to say the least. We’re seeing some small victories, and even small victories are wins. So we’re trying to add those up.
Greg Zimmerman
Let’s talk about some of those victories. Why do you think it’s crucial, as one of the leaders of Authors Against Book Bans, for authors themselves to be at the tip of the spear in the fight against book bans, and what have you found to be some of those most successful strategies for authors to beat book bans?
Samira Ahmed
We have about 5,000 authors now who are part of this group, and we’ve been doing a variety of different things. Take our small but mighty Rhode Island chapter who worked with their legislators to push forward the strongest anti-book-banning legislation in the country. That was really led by two authors, Padma Venkatraman and Jeanette Bradley. They are truly amazing. What they did is a shining model of what can happen. Not only did they bring local authors together with community organizers, they also had meetings with legislators during which they answered their questions. They worked with these legislators to create this incredibly powerful legislation.
In other places, like Rutherford County, Tennessee, we’ve worked to really raise awareness for what’s happening. Because for us, what’s happening there is really a crossing of the Rubicon, where book banners are originally claiming to be for parents’ rights and for protecting kids, and now they’re saying even adults are not going to be allowed to access these books because they don’t want to have these books anywhere in the library. And that’s just pure censorship.
We’re trying to offer support where we can for teachers. And we’re partnering with the American Booksellers Association to support independent bookstores, because they’re also on the front lines of these fights. We’ve written letters to school boards in Florida. In fact, we haven’t just had Floridian authors write letters to school boards, but we had New York and Washington State authors, two places where we’re not seeing books banned in the same way as we see them in Florida or Texas. So we’ve activated our membership there to write letters to school board members in Florida where their books have been banned.
So there are a lot of things that we’re doing. I think you need to have a lot of irons in the fire, and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to both raise awareness, but also fight back, because we find these attacks on books to be obviously abhorrent.
Greg Zimmerman
In the last three months, as the Trump administration has just flooded the zone again with bad news, book bans may get short shrift in terms of headlines. How do you keep book bans top-of-mind for people? Are there specific ways to make sure that book bans don’t fall below the fold?
Samira Ahmed
I get it that they’re flooding the zone, but we essentially have to do the same. I literally wrote a whole book about book bans, This Book Won’t Burn, which was based on a story I heard from a teacher.
One thing we really want to try to get out there is that authoritarians always attack the arts. We can go back in history to Hitler to Stalin to Pinochet, but we’ve also seen it demonstrated more recently with totalitarian regimes, when they jail artists, when they jail writers, when they censor our books.
Authoritarians hate art and they hate books for a few reasons. For one, art shines a light on truth. Books shine a light on truth. And when you ban books, when you censor books, when you control what information people are allowed to have, you can create an ignorant populace. Books and art allow us to be fully realized. Authoritarians want to oppress us. They want us to feel downtrodden. But art gives us hope.
We’re obviously aware when protesters, who are literally just expressing their First Amendment rights, can be jailed or deported. We know that this is all interrelated, and so we want to ensure that we are keeping book bans and censorship as a focal point. We’re working with so many other organizations, and we just feel we’re stronger together. Together, our voices can be louder, and we need to continue to keep shouting about it. We won’t be silenced. If you want people to hear you, you’ve got to get loud.
Greg Zimmerman
That is so inspiring! So something you’ve alluded to a couple times now is the idea that because bans are levied against marginalized writers, LGBTQ+ writers, BIPOC writers it might be tempting to suggest that book bans aren’t about book bans themselves. They’re about further marginalizing these communities. If that’s even partially true, how does that make fighting book bans even more important?
Samira Ahmed
Well, it’s totally true. Book bans are essentially an attack on not just the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought, but really the freedom to exist as you are. Book bans essentially are erasure. They are erasing entire identities from our bookshelves and erasing the idea that there is room on our shelves for every single story. When you see statistically that the majority of book bans are being levied against authors of color, BIPOC authors, queer and trans authors, you know these bans stem from a place of hate. They stem from a place of scapegoating. They stem from a place of trying to “other” large swaths of our population.
Literature and art have always been about inclusivity. It’s always been about bringing in many voices. Our art helps us become fully realized human beings. It allows us to be part of a much broader global community. We feel so strongly about fighting these book bans, because the book banners, the people who want to censor, these people also believe that trans kids don’t have a right to exist. These people come from a place of hate and exclusivity.
We’re fighting for free speech and for the freedom to tell these stories. We come from a place of love and inclusivity. Especially for young people, it’s demoralizing to be told that their stories, that their lives don’t matter, that their stories aren’t worthy of being on a bookshelf or on a TV screen.
We come from a place of love, because we believe that our duty as human beings is to ensure that every child is protected. We want to make a world where kids can be kids, where they can have joy, where they can be who they are and be accepted and loved.
This is a place where a binary exists. There are people who want to censor books and want to erase human beings, who are coming from a very narrow, hateful worldview. Those of us who believe in the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought and just the freedom to exist come from a place of inclusivity and love.
Greg Zimmerman
Can you tell me a little bit about your experience with your own books being banned?
Samira Ahmed
My experience was with what I call “soft banning,” and I think it’s really important that people realize what soft banning is, because it is insidious. It’s pervasive. Soft banning is essentially where, in a school, a principal or a department chair or someone else who has authority is saying, “No, we can’t teach that kind of book here.”
The first place I heard about this happening to my books was when a teacher told me. This was a few years ago now, but she taught in a red state in a small, mostly rural district where the majority of her students were white. She wanted to teach Internment, my second novel, in her “literary circles,” which is sort of a mini reading group, like a book club in the classroom. So maybe there’s four groups, and each group chooses a book they want to read. They discuss it, journal about it, do their projects about it. So she wanted Internment just to be one of the choices. Two other teachers objected to the book being in the classroom. When she asked them why, they told her, “Well, there are no Muslims or Indians at our school.”
That just blew me away. I’m like, you have books with dragons in your library, but there’s no dragons at your school either. I was so shocked when this happened. It had never happened before. The teacher was honestly nervous about pushing back because the other teachers were more senior than her, and she was also a single mom and primary wage earner. She said to me, “Samira, I was honestly scared of losing my job.” And she told me she felt bad about not pushing harder, because she wanted her kids to read books about people who are different than them.
Maybe these kids have never met an Indian or never met a Muslim, but we live in a world where people like me exist. Then she asked me this question that was really just a gut punch. She said, “I want to know, Samira, how can I be brave?”
That question is burned in my brain. It became really like the leading question for the book I wrote that came out of it, This Book Won’t Burn.
It’s a question I think about all the time and that I put to other adults: What are the ways that we can be brave, and continue to write so that we’re not backed into a corner by book banners and censors?
Being a target for book banners has also meant that in some places, I’ve had to do events where I travel under an alias. I’m not the only author who does that. I want to be clear, though, I’m far from the only author who has to take security measures. In fact, there are many authors who receive much, much worse. I think of all my trans author friends right now, the death threats they’re getting, the constant DMs or emails, and the names they are being called, like pedophiles and groomers and other horrible things, and people telling them that they’re going to do terrible things to them at their events.
It’s truly horrifying. But it’s also inspiring when some of these authors are still like, I’m going to write my books. I’m going to continue to make my books queer as heck. I’m going to continue to write and I’m going to continue to tell the stories I want!
For more information on joining Authors Against Book Bans and how you can help fight book bans, please visit the organization’s website.
