In September, one of the largest public school systems in Tennessee banned Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved. In 2023, a police officer showed up to a classroom in Massachusetts after a parent disapproved of illustrations in Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. A librarian was fired in Texas after she refused to put so-called inappropriate books behind the counter, including a title about the origins of the KKK. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] These are only a handful of the many flashpoints of the national rise in book bans, which has grown exponentially over the past four years.