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Organizations such as the American Library Association (ALA), EveryLibrary, and PEN America have been tracking the sharp escalation of book challenges since 2021. These challenges have centered on school and public libraries across the United States; the number of challenges and bans is higher than it’s been in more than twenty years.Often, books and materials with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) authors, themes, and protagonists are targeted for removal or restriction. Likewise, books that contain themes of social justice or institutional racial injustice (frequently written by or featuring Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color or BIPOC) are common targets.

Woodard thanks the librarians for allowing her the opportunity to serve them and learn from them. This has been a year of change and challenge, but it has been a privilege to serve an organization that has meant so much to her throughout her career as a librarian in Texas. She appreciates the opportunity to represent the Texas Library Association (TLA) members in these tough and worrisome times. TLA would not function without all the librarians.

Today's authoritarian states—notably including China and Russia—are using \"sharp power\" to project their influence internationally, with the objectives of limiting free expression, spreading confusion, and distorting the political environment within democracies. Sharp power is an approach to international affairs that typically involves efforts at censorship or the use of manipulation to sap the integrity of independent institutions. This approach takes advantage of the asymmetry between free and unfree systems, allowing authoritarian regimes both to limit free expression and to distort political environments in democracies while simultaneously shielding their own domestic public spaces from democratic appeals coming from abroad.

AbstractThe last 4 years of headlines describing the various book bans and curricular gag orders happening in the United States serve as an important context for P–12 teachers’ daily work. This article describes the findings from a qualitative survey that sought to understand what influences P–12 teachers’ text selection for teaching and for inclusion in their classroom library in the aforementioned context. Teachers reported stakeholders who held decision-making power as well as which stakeholders were influential in their text selection. Three overarching themes emerged from teachers’ most influential factors in their text selection: social and communal influences, literary content and value, and curriculum and planning. Critical sociocultural theory is used to interpret the findings, revealing P–12 teachers’ complex and sometimes conflicting perspectives between their text selection practices and national, state, and district politics. Additionally, the authors report how P–12 teachers’ beliefs and surveyed concerns can work as a form of censorship with or without accompanying book-banning legislation. The authors call for more political education about national, state, and district policies in teacher education as well as incorporating material for justifying and teaching BIPOC- and LGBTQ-authored texts in the discussion and implication section.