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Pat Scales, chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and SLJ columnist, regularly fields questions on banned library materials. But “this is the first I’ve encountered in which a book’s format has been censored,” she writes.
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is expecting an unusual window display starting September 30—writer and editor Corey Michael Dalton plans to mark Banned Books Week by camping out there to demonstrate the value of our freedom to read.
By SLJ Staff
And Tango Makes Three (2005), the true story of two male penguins who hatch and parent a baby chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo, tops the list of the most frequently challenged books of 2010, according to the American Library Association’s (ALA) State of America’s Libraries Report, which documents challenges and trends in library usage.
The picture book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell has appeared on ALA’s Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books for [...]
Self-censorship is rampant and lethal
By Debra Lau Whelan
Illustration by Brian Stauffer
When Barry Lyga finished writing his second young adult novel, he knew there’d be trouble. After all, Boy Toy was about a 12-year-old who has sex with a beautiful teacher twice his age, and Lyga expected it to spark letters to local papers, trigger complaints to the school board, and incite some parents to yank it off library shelves.
But none of those things ever happened.
“The book just [...]
