There’s a revolution happening in children’s publishing—you can thank the book bans

Nikkolas Smith knows a thing or two about book bans. The illustrator has created five picture books over the last three years—four of which have been yanked off library shelves. There’s I am Ruby Bridges , about the civil rights icon; That Flag about the confederate flag; Born on the Water , which explores slavery; and The Artivist which features a child supporting trans kids. 



Book bans aren’t new; the practice is centuries old . But over the past four years, right-wing organizations have been on a crusade to remove books from school libraries and classrooms. Last school year, these groups challenged more than 3,000 titles . The top reasons for contesting books is that they deal with LBGTQ+ issues or shine a light on racism. As someone who tackles both of these issues in his work, Smith has gotten used to his books being challenged. “In many cases, librarians don’t even bother buying them, because they know parents will contest them,” he says. “They don’t even have a chance to be banned.” 



But while the book bans cut into his sales, Smith says he’s more motivated than ever to keep working on issues that are important to him. “It fires me up to make more books about truth and history and justice for all,” he says. “I want to live in a country where there is diversity of thought.”



Smith isn’t alone. Publishers, writers, and progressive organizations across the children’s book industry aren’t letting the book bans hold them back. Instead, they’re turning the bans into a rallying cry to publish even more diverse characters and points of view. Indeed, over the last five years, there has been a steady increase in books by and about people of color. And people are finding creative ways to make sure these books get out into the world. 



“The media tends to highlight the problems, but there is also a lot of good that is happening as well,” says Jason Low, publisher of Lee & Low Books , which has focused on publishing multicultural books for kids for three decades.







The New Wave of Book Bans



Miriam Blum, a 69-year-old retired schoolteacher, has experienced book bans throughout her life. When she was in high school, Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye were challenged because of their racially charged and sexual content. Then, while a middle school English teacher in the 2000s, the principal of her school called Blum to say that a parent was offended that she was teaching The Diary of Anne Frank in class. 



“This parent didn’t want the book to make children dislike German people,” she says. “I was teaching 250 kids a day and this was just another problem I had to deal with. It meant that I was no longer really free to teach what I felt was important.”



Parents have contested books for decades, but the number of challenges has exploded since the fall of 2020. Teachers and librarians, who are already stretched thin, are on the frontlines, facing the ire of parents. The American Library Association invites librarians to report these challenges to books, for their record-keeping. “In the past, we received a couple of reports a week,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s office of intellectual freedom. “That has accelerated to four or five reports a day. On some days, we’re getting a dozen reports.”



Caldwell-Stone says that the pandemic created the conditions for this new wave of book banning. Some parents across the country felt outraged at government-mandated school closures and demanded that parents have more say over their children’s education. This created an opening for advocacy organizations that oppose books about gender identity, sexual orientation, and racism. More than a hundred other groups , including Moms for Liberty and Americans for Prosperity Florida began organizing to empower parents to challenge books in schools. “They were seizing a political moment,” says Caldwell-Stone. 



Book banning only accelerated as the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements spread across the country. “They began pursuing an agenda of silencing the voices of marginalized communities and erasing their stories from library shelves so that young people could not access them,” Caldwell-Stone says. 







The Empire Strikes Back



Jason Low, publisher of Lee & Low Books, is familiar with the notion of people of color being erased from history. His father, Tom Low, founded the publishing house three decades ago because he saw a serious lack of representation in children’s literature. Of the 4,500 kid’s books that came out in 1994, only 8% were by or about BIPOC people. Today, the company remains a family-owned, independent publisher. 



“Our books are about people who have been omitted from history, so this wave of book bans is familiar to us,” he says. “The groups ban books under the guise of protecting children, but it’s more insidious than that. They’re using a well-worn playbook for erasing communities of color and LGBTQ communities.”



One part of the playbook is for conservative groups to arm parents with tools to march into schools and challenge books. Moms for Liberty, for instance, runs a website called BookLooks.org that offers “book reports” about thousands of books which parents can bring to school board meetings or their child’s principal. 



For instance, they can print out a report about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , which contains a list of concerns: inflammatory racial and religious commentary; sexual activities including sexual assault and  molestation; alcohol use. Many will use these reports word for word to call for it to be pulled from shelves. “Once the challenges are on the table, they’re discussed at school board meetings and community events by people, some of whom haven’t even read the books,” says Rich Thomas, HarperCollins’s executive director of children’s book publishing. 



But over the last few years, publishers, progressive organizations, and students have found ways to fight back. Unite Against Book Bans, for instance, offers ‘book resumés’ that schools and parents can use to explain why it might be important for children to have access to these books. The organization works closely with publishers to create in-depth descriptions for contentious books. Its resumés of The Bluest Eye explains that it won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It also lays out how students in Missouri filed a lawsuit with the help of the ACLU to reinstate it, which could serve as a playbook for other districts.



Low says people in the book banning movement tend to reduce entire books to a single theme, such as racism or alternate sexualities. But books are often about a much broader range of important issues. When his marketing teams reach out to schools about books, they make sure to write extensive teachers’ guides about each one, laying out the range of topics it covers.



For instance, one book that has been challenged is Catching the Moon , which is about the first Black woman who played on a major league baseball team. While the conservative book paints it as a book about racism, Lee & Low emphasizes that it is also a book about sports and resilience. “It’s usually about 12 bullet points for each book,” Low says. “You can pick any one of them as a point of connection.”







Flooding The Market With Diversity



Even big publishing houses are reckoning with book bans. HarperCollins, for instance, one of the top four publishers in the world, has had dozens of its books in its catalog challenge. This includes classics like Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” to more recent titles like The Undefeated , an award-winning book about slavery and the civil rights movement. 



Thomas, who oversees all children’s books published at HarperCollins, is alarmed about how pervasive the current books bans are. “It’s a real sobering moment for me,” he says. “Book bans and challenges ebb and flow. But it’s never been as pronounced as it is right now. It’s just relentless.”



But as a major publisher, Thomas believes that one way to fight back is simply to keep churning out more diverse books, even if this means some of the books will have diminished sales. “As publishers, it’s crucial that we don’t let these challenges change the way we work,” says Thomas. “The best thing we can do is to make sure our books are more diverse than ever. Even if this means we’re going to sell fewer copies of the book.” 



At a systemic level, this means hiring editors and acquiring manuscripts from writers who come from a wide range of communities. This has already been happening across the publishing industry for several years now. While progress is slow, the needle is moving. Lee & Low publishes a survey about the demographics in the publishing workforce. It found that between 2015 and 2023, the number of BIPOC workers in publishing increased from 21% to 27.5%. “Workforces change incrementally,” says Jason Low, who commissioned this research. “I think this survey shows that we are trending in the right direction.”



Another study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tracks how many new children’s books that come out every year are by or about BIPOC people. It has found that the numbers have been trending upwards. For instance, only 11% of books were about Black people in 2018; by 2023, that figure was 15%. 



To help achieve these goals, HarperCollins has launched several new imprints focused specifically on underrepresented voices. This includes Versify, Allida, and HeartDrum, which is devoted to Native voices. “We want to create a space within these imprints for creators to feel supported, working with editors who share their experiences,” Thomas says. “We want to make sure that there are books for every kid out there.”



Many in the publishing industry believe that book bans harm all kids, by restricting their access to knowledge. Sailaja Joshi argues that they inflict particular harm on kids of color and LGBTQ kids, who might go though their entire childhood not seeing themselves represented in books. “The book bans just reinforce their sense of isolation and marginalization,” Joshi says. 



With so many books being pulled from libraries, Joshi wants to work outside the school system to get books to kids. In 2021, she launched a nonprofit called For The Love of Reading that brings diverse books to places where kids might otherwise struggle to find books that reflect themselves. Joshi was inspired by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which mails millions of free books each month to children in under-resourced communities. Joshi’s organization receives donations to buy new books on diverse issues, and gift them to kids in “book deserts.” She sees this as a way to help bolster the sales of diverse authors, but more importantly, to empower kids.



“I always remind people that if books weren’t powerful, they wouldn’t try to limit our access to them,” Joshi says. “Putting diverse books in the hands of children is a revolutionary act in this country.”