Banned Book Read-Out decries censorship, celebrates the freedom to read

Banned Book Read-Out celebrates the freedom to read

The event was held in Bird Library, and called on attendees to bring their favorite banned books to share with others.
Published: September 26, 2022
People sitting down on chairs, facing a woman on a podium reading an excerpt from a book, while her words appear on a television screen and a woman sitting near here translates her words to American Sign Language.
People gathered In Bird Library on Thursday, Sept. 22, to share their favorite banned books and advocate for the freedom to read.

Syracuse University and fellow Syracuse community members gathered in the Bird Library last Thursday to celebrate Banned Books Week with a Banned Book Read-Out.

The event encouraged attendees to share passages from banned books and spark conversations about literary censorship.

The Departments of English, African American Studies and LGBTQ Studies, in company with the LGBTQ Resource Center, the Library and Information Science Program and Syracuse University Libraries, hosted the read-out.

Joan Bryant, Professor of African American Studies, began the event by stating the number 1,651. This number represents the number of book titles, excluding prisons and informal bans, that have been challenged in the past year.

“The point of doing a read-out is to celebrate the freedom to read, to remind people that it is a freedom that is challenged every day,” Bryant said.

Banned Books Week is an annual nationwide celebration that promotes the right to read. Although the event was established in 1982, the organization’s encouragement of free knowledge — no matter how unorthodox or controversial — is more important than ever as American book bans reach record highs, according to a recent PEN America study.

From July 2021 to June 2022, the study notes 2,532 efforts to restrict or ban 1,648 different books, reflecting the highest number of attempted book bans in the past two decades. The majority of these bans target books featuring LGBTQ content and people of color.

This year’s read-out focused on children’s literature according to Payton Cooke, an iSchool library science graduate student and curator of the event.

“We wanted to focus on books that are banned in a way that prevents children from living in the complex world we live in today,” Cooke said.

Syracuse community members presented many children’s books, such as Jacob’s New Dress by Ian and Sarah Hoffman, Today It’s Okay to be Different by Todd Parr and Something Happened In Our Town by Donald Moses and Marianne Celano.

Jacob’s New Dress was banned in a North Carolina school district in 2018 for its normalization of transgender behavior. In Oak Park, California, Today It’s Okay to be Different was banned in 2020 for its gender identity inclusion. Finally, Something Happened in Our Town was banned in Papillion-La Vista Schools in Nebraska for anti-police sentiments.

In addition to children’s literature, attendees presented passages from a wide range of other genres. These genres varied from classics, such as Animal Farm by George Orwell and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, to the Bible. Readers also read two books from the American Library Association (ALA) Office For Intellectual Freedom’s (OIF) list of 2021’s top ten challenged books: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Various books are laid out and stacked near each other on a table with a blue tablecloth.
Some of the books present at the Banned Book Read-Out.

Jorge Castillo, the director of the LGBTQ Resource Center, read an excerpt from Melissa by Alex Gino, which was restricted for LGBTQIA+ content and religious conflicts. Castillo explained that often people don’t fully understand why these books, such as Melissa, are banned.

“There’s nothing graphic about [Melissa] and yet it was banned just because it has a sort of queer relationship,” Castillo said. “I think it’s important for people to know that these books are not as offensive as they can seem.”

Many attendees joined the read-out to support First Amendment rights and unrestricted access to literature.

“I truly believe that freedom of speech is really, really important and I think censorship stands in complete opposition to that freedom…so I am here to celebrate defeating censorship and defying banning books,” said SU student Riley Pratt.

Although the Banned Book Week concludes on Sept. 24, the library encourages the Syracuse community to continue reading banned books and stimulating conversation. The library will feature banned book displays and research guides throughout the remainder of the year.