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HELP PROGRESSIVE ACTION - SAVE THE DATES [1]

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Date: 2022-08-25

SEPTEMBER 18TH TO SEPTEMBER 24 2022 IS BANNED BOOKS WEEK NATIONWIDE

WITH THANKS AND A SHOUT OUT TO www.dailykos.com/… pr0gressivist for assistance with this post.

Banned Books Week is September 18-September 24th.

Each year, libraries around the country and the American Library Association celebrate

Banned Books Week. September 18th to 24th this year the theme is

“BOOKS UNITE US- CENSORSHIP DIVIDES US”

Teenagers nationwide can resist the banning of books by receiving a FREE library card for E books from the Brooklyn Public Library.

$50 is normally the annual fee for this library card for people outside New York State.

The program is administered by teenagers in New York who sign up other teens via Instagram and a Brooklyn Library email account assigned to them. “Teenager to Teenager”, I guess it could be called?

Librarians and Teen Volunteers Spearhead Books UnBanned Initiative to Combat Censorship

“Access to information is the great promise upon which public libraries were founded,” said Linda E. Johnson, President and CEO, Brooklyn Public Library . “We cannot sit idly by while books rejected by a few are removed from the library shelves for all. Books UnBanned will act as an antidote to censorship, offering teens and young adults across the country unlimited access to our extensive collection of ebooks and audiobooks, including those which may be banned in their home libraries.”

The card will be good for one year and is designed to complement access to resources for teens in their local communities. The Brooklyn Public Library eCard provides access to 350,00 e-books; 200,000 audiobooks and over 100 databases. Teens will also be connected to their peers in Brooklyn, including members of BPL’s Intellectual Freedom Teen Council, to help one another with information and resources to fight censorship, book recommendations and the defense of freedom to read. To apply for the card, teens can send a note to [email protected], or via the Library’s s teen-run Instagram account, @bklynfuture. The $50 fee normally associated with out-of-state cards will be waived. Teens are encouraged to share videos, essays, and stories on the importance of intellectual freedom and the impact that book challenges and bans have had on their lives. The library will also make a selection of frequently challenged books available with no holds or wait times for all BPL cardholders, available through the library's online catalog or Libby app. The titles include: The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Tomboy by Liz Prince, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison While challenges to books and ideas are nothing new, the initiative was conceived in response to an increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves. The American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom counted more than 700 complaints last year, the most since it began keeping records more than 20 years ago.

In Texas, Matt Krause, chairman of the Texas House of Representatives General Investigating Committee, has called for public school libraries to “account” for 850 sexually explicit or racially preferential books. The list includes a wide range of titles from National Book Award winner How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi to John Irving’s best selling Cider House Rules. Books which feature LBGQT characters; advice for dealing with bullies; and tips for teens on relationships are all included on the list, along with titles on historical events including the rise of the KKK, the Indian Removal Act and the election of Harvey Milk.

Book Riot reports that Moms for Liberty, a conservative group with 70,000 members nationwide has a new initiative titled Moms for Libraries which aims to have books exploring sexual identity and racial polarization removed from the shelves of local libraries.



In Tennessee, the McMinn County School Board voted to remove the reading of Maus, an award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the eighth-grade curriculum. In Llano County, Texas, a librarian was fired after she refused to follow instructions to remove books, including one about a teen who identified as transgender. Lawmakers in Indiana had been considering a bill that would allow librarians to be jailed for inappropriate content.

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