EP87: Reading Banned Books with PEN America

It's a very special episode this week, as we're joined by Sabrina Baeta, senior program manager on the Freedom to Read team at PEN America, an organization founded by authors more than 100 years ago to protect the freedom to write and read whatever you want. Sabrina's here to talk about book bans, which are a priori uncool, and which she works to defeat. There have been more than 10,000 efforts in the past year alone to ban individual books in school settings across the United States, and efforts to ban books are increasing rapidly, particulary books for younger kids. That's bad. So, we all read some banned books, including:

- "And Tango Makes Three," by Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell, and Henry Cole
- "Queer Ducks," by Eliot Schrefer and Jules Zuckerberg
- "A Court of Mist and Fury," by Sarah J. Maas 
- "Gender Queer," by Maia Kobabe
- "The Kite Runner," by Khaled Hosseini
- "The Fire Next Time," by James Baldwin
- "James," by Percival Everett
- "Red, White, and Royal Blue," by Casey McQuiston

Y'all, there are some really good arguments against banning books in this episode and some great discussion of the power of literature. You need to listen to it!