Unite Against Book Bans, an anti-censorship initiative of the American Library Association, opened its Book Résumé Database in February 2024, providing easy-access credentials for banned and challenged titles. A year later, the Book Résumé Database has grown to some 600 downloadable dossiers, compiled by UABB and more than 50 publishers, and its creators aim to create 1,000 résumés by the end of 2025.

To reach this goal, the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom will partner with the Unite to Read Project at Ohio State University, which has received a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for community outreach around the freedom to read. Printz Honoree Ashley Hope Pérez, author of the frequently challenged 2019 novel Out of Darkness, and editor of the new anthology Banned Together, is a faculty member at Ohio State and the principal investigator on the Mellon grant.

Eric Stroshane, assistant director for the Office of Intellectual Freedom, has been working on the Book Résumé Database from the start. “My main job is supporting librarians and library administrators when they’re faced with an effort to censor their resources,” Stroshane said. Using case law and First Amendment principles, he confidentially helps librarians justify a book’s place on their shelves to their board or town council. Readily accessible book résumés “are huge time savers when a book is challenged,” Stroshane explained, because they demonstrate “there’s a reason this is in the library” and reinforce library selection criteria.

A book résumé might be described as a professional book report, complete with a synopsis and publication information, any reviews and awards the book has received, links to media coverage, and teaching guides if available. Each portfolio attests to the merits of a targeted book, whether it’s facing a challenge on the basis of its subject matter, the identity of its author, “or a few quotations taken out of context in order to fuel outrage,” Stroshane said. The résumé information “restores the meaning to the passages that are being used to lampoon them” and counteracts the tactics censors use to target material.

Résumé Builders

Book résumés are not a new invention, said Skip Dye, SVP of library sales and digital strategy at Penguin Random House, [who’s been working] with Stroshane on the UABB project since its inception. Dye credits librarian Martha Hickson with pioneering the idea, and he noted that the National Council of Teachers of English has a similar approach, Book Rationales.

To build the database, Dye’s hope was that publishers—who collect media mentions and practical resources on their titles—could work together on the résumés. He brought in Carmela Iaria, VP and executive director of school and library marketing at PRH, and Mary Van Akin, director of school and library marketing at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, to guide the collaboration; School Library Journal and TeachingBooks are partners too. “It is a village—we have publishers all working together on this,” Dye said, humorously marveling that “we agreed upon a template! We should be given awards just for that”—a rare instance of consensus.

“It’s so hard to collaborate, usually, but this has brought all of us together toward a common goal,” Van Akin agreed. “You can feel a little helpless” due to relentless banning efforts, she said, yet “we are 100% experts on our books. At Macmillan, we have a network of about 30 employees who volunteer their time” to fill in the details on portfolios. “It feels really good to make the people on the front lines’ lives easier, so they don’t have to go to every individual publisher website to find these pieces of data” when they are building an exhaustive case for a book.

Iaria explained that a résumé can be crafted for any title. The database prioritizes books with recorded challenges or bans, tracking cases with up-to-the-minute ALA data, PEN America data, and emails from authors and agents. Authors who are on banners’ lists get extra attention. “If an author is involved in advocacy or activism, visiting their school board, or being named in a lawsuit, we know that they’re drawing attention,” Iaria said.

Sometimes, a lack of information about a book or author means a résumé will be on the slim side. “There are titles we know are vulnerable to being challenged,” such as debuts or small indie press titles featuring content on politicized identities, Iaria said. “Those are sometimes the more difficult ones to create résumés for, because they’re newly published,” and media links or teachers’ guides don’t exist yet. “We need professional reviews on those books, and they don’t have to be starred or glowing,” Iaria said, underscoring the legitimizing value of a trade review.

Pérez of the Unite to Read Project, agreed with Iaria. “We monitor book rating sites, so we know when a book is coming in the crosshairs” and proactively respond, she said. “But for some classic titles, we need resources, and when reviews are more difficult to find, that gets more labor-intensive.”

Grassroots Organizing

Although many publishers support and write book résumés, the UABB team wants to make the résumé-building process more community driven. “Hopefully, as the project gains momentum, more and more publishers will be interested in contributing,” Stroshane said. While more than 50 publishers are on board, others are participating “maybe not at a level commensurate with the effort to censor books that they have published,” he said.

Dye at PRH has been called to testify on behalf of books banned in school districts and named in lawsuits, and he likes to use book résumés in his testimony. The more collective the UABB endeavor, the more convincing and “publisher-agnostic” the database can be, Dye said. “It gives more credence to have that document through a third-party site, not supplied by PRH,” he explained, because book résumés are not promotional in a traditional sense.

This is where Pérez and the Unite to Read Project come in. “The Unite to Read project is a single Mellon Foundation-funded project at the Ohio State University,” Pérez told PW. “It isn’t solely supporting the book résumés, but it’s incorporating community sourcing to fill the gaps left by publishers. We need every stakeholder to get involved.” Funds for the project also will support instructional design related to book banning and community projects, including a six-week institute, on the freedom to read.

Pérez views the book résumés as a practical foundation for a critical argument. “A book résumé is a first step to accurately representing the books,” she said. “All of these books deserve to be engaged as literature, and the résumés are not just defending the books but creating space for reading the books, supplying resources for banned book clubs, and restoring books that have been removed.”

The list of targeted books is a long one, and Pérez wants to be sure that amid the outcry, “the beauty and value of books is being recognized.” She asks her students, and the general public, “to step outside of their own preferences and ask, ‘For whom is this book a gift or a resource?’ A reader may have needs and circumstances different from our own. We need to honor the belonging of all members of the community.”

Iaria said the UABB team is enriched by its work with Pérez and Unite to Read. “Up until this point, it’s been grassroots, building this project,” she said. “Now that we’re partnering with the Mellon Foundation and this project, it’s about, ‘What does the future look like? How do we build this out?’ ” The need for action remains urgent, and UABB looks forward to sharing its résumés.