From School Library Journal:
PEN America today released a data summary looking at nearly 6,000 book bans in public schools
documented from July 2021 to June 2023. Over the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years, the sweeping attack on the freedom to read in public schools impacted 247 school districts across 41 states, PEN America said. Spineless Shelves: Two Years of Book Banning demonstrates two phenomena: copycat bans and a “Scarlet Letter” effect on authors.
The copycat bans can be seen clearly after books that are banned in one district can be found on challenged and banned lists in school districts across state lines. The report offers this example: In the 2021-2022 school year, Sarah J. Maas’s work was banned 18 times across 10 districts. In 2022-23, that exploded to 158 bans across 36 districts, a 778 percent increase. As PEN America explored in Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools, groups pushing for book bans frequently share lists of targeted titles to target.
. . . .
Those authors not only find people pushing to censor a book in many districts after it has been challenged in one; when they have a book banned, more of their titles are targeted. The organization calls this the Scarlet Letter effect and once again uses Maas as an example. In the 2021-2022 school year, eight of her titles were banned. This doubled to sixteen titles in 2022-23. A similar effect has impacted bestselling authors Ellen Hopkins, Jodi Picoult, Alice Oseman, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Rupi Kaur, among others, according to the report.
Link to the rest at School Library Journal