There were 6,870 separate instances of book bans across 23 states due to “sexually explicit” or “un-American” material during the 2024-2025 school year, according to PEN America. These bans are affecting access to literature for book-lovers of all generations. But they’re also leading to an uptick in a new form of protest: banned-book clubs, where communities can come together to read and discuss the controversial titles in question.
“I had really just started getting back into reading, and I wanted exactly what a book club is, which is a community around books and a place to have these important conversations,” said Iris Mogul, Youth Honorary Chair for the American Library Association’s 2025 Banned Books Week.
When Mogul was 16 and a student at Miami’s Academy for Advanced Academics, she started a banned-books club in collaboration with local bookshop Books & Books.
Although Mogul, now 19, intended for the club to attract fellow students, she soon discovered that a much wider demographic was intrigued by the embattled books.
“It was mostly people a lot older than me,” Mogul said. “There are, I think, three high school English teachers, a couple retired professors, a retired librarian.”
The group, which still meets, has read classics like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” alongside new releases like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Message,” which she said led to lively but respectful discussion.
Exploring titles from across genres and time periods to understand what’s really within a book is one of the missions of banned-book clubs, including the “Velshi Banned Book Club,” started by Ali Velshi, host of MS Now’s “Velshi.”
“Some of [the books are] classics that people read in high school,” Velshi said. “It may have been Shakespeare, it may have been Margaret Atwood … And then there’s this whole category of books, YA, which didn’t really exist as a genre … Or graphic novels, to which the audience that I catered to were unfamiliar. And they loved it.”
Velshi also said that he supports a family’s right to choose what their children should read, which he says is a sentiment reflected by many of the authors he’s spoken to for his show.
“A lot of authors understand this material is complicated and tough,” Velshi said. “You want the teachers and the librarians involved to the degree possible. You want your parents involved to the degrees possible. But all of that is separate and apart from removing access to books.”
Keeping books accessible in public and school libraries is part of the reason Elizabeth Sherry, the director of Elizabeth Taber Library in Marion, Mass., founded a banned-books club in 2022. That year, 10 books were being challenged at the local high school, which could have led to removal. Contentious school-committee meetings and growing conversation led to more people stopping by the library to learn about the books in question, which, in turn, inspired Sherry.
“We decided to take this curiosity that we saw and channel it into what we hope would be very respectful community conversations,” Sherry said. “We hoped that we could give people an opportunity to have these discussions about these materials in an open-minded way, and we’re very happy to say that that is what started happening at the library.”
In addition to reading and sharing banned books, Elizabeth Taber Library’s banned-book club uses educational presentations to inform the public about the longstanding history of censorship. Even with these major strides in local and national community-building, Mogul, Velshi and Sherry look forward to widening the conversation.
“On a really individual level, continue having conversations … encouraging young people to be part of the conversation and take charge over what we can and can’t read,” Mogul said.
“The barriers to entry to preserve the right to read, to have reading as resistance, is actually very low,” Velshi said. “Everybody can have a piece of this.”
“Whenever possible, just put books into people’s hands, because that is the greatest cure for prejudice against the title itself,” Sherry said.
Guests
- Elizabeth Sherry, director of the Elizabeth Taber Library in Marion, Mass.
- Iris Mogul, Youth Honorary Chair for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week 2025
- Ali Velshi, an award-winning journalist, host of “Velshi” and Chief Correspondent for MS NOW, a weekly economics contributor to NPR’s “Here And Now,” host of the “Velshi Banned Book Club” on MS NOW, and the “Velshi Banned Book Club” podcast
