The library is always there to help. That’s especially true during Banned Books Week , which kicks off on Sept. 22.
The yearly event not only celebrates the free access of ideas, but it also highlights the increasing efforts to ban books – especially targeting titles featuring characters or written by authors who are LGBTQ+ and BIPOC . This year’s honorary chair is filmmaker Ava DuVernay and its youth honorary chair is Julia Garnett, a Tennessee student and a leader in the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Student Advocates for Speech program who has fought book bans in her home state . This week, I got on the phone with Cindy Hohl, the president of the American Library Association , to talk about Banned Books Week and more.
“Banned Books Week has been going on for more than 40 years now, and it’s an opportunity for us to bring awareness to the attempts to remove books and materials from libraries, schools and bookstores,” says Hohl. “Even bookstores are being told what they can stock and what should be available to consumers. So this year’s theme for Banned Books Week is ‘Freed Between the Lines,’ and it’s an observance of the freedom we find in the pages of books.
And as librarians, we are here to defend that freedom from censorship.” Librarians’ jobs are more complex and challenging than most of us realize, so I asked Hohl how librarians are dealing the surge in book banning. “Our goal is to always put books into the hands of readers,”.