Jenan Matari had just begun promoting her debut children’s book this summer when the cancellations began. First, Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles called off her event after what Matari described as pressure from local community members. The employee who had booked the event refused to cancel it, and the bookstore fired her. Two days later, another employee quit in solidarity.

Then came New Jersey. Watchung Booksellers, a community bookstore in Montclair, was set to host her next reading but abruptly canceled, explaining in an emailed statement it was “to ensure the safety of our staff and customers”.

Matari had recently published Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden, a picture book about a young Palestinian girl learning about her heritage through her grandfather’s gardening, rooted in his own father’s traditions from Palestine. But local campaigns targeted bookstores that planned to host readings by Matari, focusing on her social media posts about Israel and Gaza.

Three thousand miles away and a couple of months earlier, Safa Suleiman was flying to Seattle for her very first school visit for her publishing debut, Hilwa’s Gifts. Her phone rang mid-flight: the Arabic and Hindi language school had canceled her visit because of a 2024 blogpost on her website where she had shared details about her family members being killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

“I never saw myself in children’s books growing up, and I was about to share my book with children who may never have seen themselves in children’s books either,” Suleiman said.

These experiences are part of a wave of censorship that has swept across the United States since 7 October 2023, interviews with nine children’s authors reveal. Event cancellations, book bans and coordinated harassment campaigns have proliferated through schools, libraries, and bookstores, targeting authors who have either written about Palestinian life and culture, have supported Palestinian rights, or been caught in the backlash simply for their visibly Muslim identity.

For some of the Palestinian American authors among them, the pattern makes them feel that their very existence is threatening, and sharing idyllic stories that define their childhood – however innocent – can trigger organized campaigns accusing them of seeding antisemitism and hatred.

According to 2024 research by the author and educator Nora Lester Murad, there have been 114 English-language children’s books explicitly centering Palestinian narratives exist for K-12 readers. There has been an uptick in recent years – 44% of Palestinian children’s books since 1998 were published between 2019 and 2023. Yet much of this increase comes from self-publishing, with 32% of recent titles self-published as traditional publishers remain reluctant gatekeepers.

“It’s this effort to reject the people,” Matari said. “Now that we’ve broken through this industry and there’s more books coming out, it’s like … we can’t stop people from reading your story. So we can stop people from getting to know you, or connecting the authors with the stories that they write.”

“Freedom of speech isn’t afforded to everybody in this country, especially if you’re Palestinian,” she added.

The first full week of October is Banned Books Week in the US and is a time meant to highlight censored voices. Yet pro-Palestinian authors are finding themselves at the center of a new form of literary censorship, though the books being challenged don’t advocate political positions or promote hatred. They tell simple stories of gardens and olive trees, of children navigating identity and language, of family traditions preserved across generations.

The books themselves aren’t always the focus of the protests – in some cases it’s the opinions of the authors, expressed on social media or elsewhere. “Nobody had a problem with the book. Palestinian voices are important. The problem was this particular author and the views she holds,” one rabbi involved in the protest against Matari’s event in New Jersey told a local paper.

But that kind of scrutiny strikes some authors are unfair. “You have to prove that you’re innocent of being an antisemite if you have any kind of pro-Palestinian commentary. Even just saying, ‘Here’s a link to donate to Palestinian kids’ – that becomes political,” said Jamila Thompkins-Bigelow, who had a school event originally scheduled for October 2023 get postponed and ultimately canceled months later.

On 7 October, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a pair of bills into law designed to combat hate and antisemitism in schools. One new law establishes an office of civil rights and an antisemitism prevention coordinator, and requires districts to investigate and take corrective action when “discriminatory content is used in classrooms or professional development”.

The concern swirling in the world of children’s authors is that the vague language could be used to label their books and their stories as discriminatory, giving state officials legal cover to further suppress Palestinian narratives from schools, and perhaps see these restrictions expand in other states and professional settings.

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Earlier this month, Hannah Moushabeck received a call about an upcoming speaking engagement at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she had been invited to discuss her book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine and the censorship attempts against it. University administrators told her that her book violated North Carolina’s compelled speech and neutrality law because it “doesn’t show two sides to the story”. Moushabeck could attend the event, administrators told her, but she was prohibited from reading from her book.

But it’s hardly the first experience with censorship this author had to endure. Moushabeck said she had had five visits cancelled since 2023 and the threats became physical at her nephew’s elementary school in Amherst, Massachusetts, last year. “I had to arrive at the school at six o’clock in the morning and go in through the back with a security escort,” Moushabeck said. A Jewish friend accompanied her for additional protection while school security and police remained on standby. “I remember having to do my school visit and keep a smile on my face and keep incredibly calm, because I really didn’t want my nephew to see that we were at risk.”

At Germantown Friends, a Quaker school in Philadelphia, Thompkins-Bigelow was scheduled for an all-day visit in October 2023 to launch her book Sister Friend – a story about friendship between a Black girl and a Muslim classmate who wears a hijab. A couple of days before the event, administrators announced a postponement.

“They felt that in the time that we were in, it was a protective measure,” Thompkins-Bigelow recalled. What followed was months of rescheduling without firm dates, culminating in contract termination in February 2024 after around 150 Jewish parents demanded the school remain “a safe space for Jewish students”.

“I felt like the microscope was on me as soon as they recognized that, oh, this is a Muslim author and she said something about Palestine,” Thompkins-Bigelow, who wears a hijab, said.

Autumn Allen faced similar targeting last year when two of her planned school visits were canceled, one in the Sharon city school district in Pennsylvania just days before the event.

Allen, who writes young adult novels and picture books, was scheduled to discuss her work when parents began flooding the administration with complaints after seeing promotional materials. But the content of her writing wasn’t the issue. Instead, complaints sent to school administrators cited her social media posts about Palestinian rights.

The Sharon district and another school in Brookline where she was an alumna buckled under pressure from what Allen described as “a handful of very loud” voices creating “this urgency and this feeling of horror” about her visit.

“It’s never about the content of the talk. It’s always about who I am as a person,” Allen said. “And at the end of the day the parents were saying they were going to show up at protests and [the administrator] said they didn’t want to make a scene in front of the kids.”

The Egyptian American author Aya Khalil said her book The Arabic Quilt was removed from Pennsylvania’s Central York district not because anyone objected to its story but because “diverse” books were the target. “They didn’t even read the book. They’re just like, OK, we’re gonna remove these books from the shelf.”

Afterwards, she started to notice how her own bookings dropped dramatically after being outspoken about the censorship surrounding Palestine and Palestinian authors, illustrators, creatives and educators.

“A lot of them haven’t been getting invited to schools or they have been getting their author visits canceled,” Khalil said. “I used to get maybe 10 to 15 libraries per year.” Now she rarely fields requests.

Ironically, the attempted suppression has sometimes backfired. Matari’s book sold out its first printing of 5,000 copies before it reached store shelves, and Khalil estimates 10,000 copies of her books were purchased in the York school district, largely due to community support mobilized in response to the cancellations and bans.

For Khalil, the experience led her to write a new book, The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale, about a girl who organizes a bake sale to buy back banned books, eventually leading to a reversal of the ban.

At least one author has been able to rebuff attempts to cancel her events. Maysa Odeh, whose debut book A Map for Falasteen, about a little girl named Falasteen learning about her roots, faced removal attempts in Watertown, Massachusetts, in an organized campaign by a group called End Jew Hatred. Watertown officials were flooded with thousands of complaint emails following the call to action to cut it from the second-grade summer reading list, but the library stood their ground.

“I can’t really get into the mind of the person who read my book and felt threatened by it,” Odeh said.

At the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference last November, Odeh and other authors required security after being targeted by the pro-Israel media organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), which has been long accused of smear and intimidation tactics. The group, which also runs an education institute, attends teaching conferences, and has continued to document and monitor pro-Palestine voices.

“I kind of went into it blind and when I realized they were there, I reached out to my publisher, and NCTE offered a security guard,” Odeh said about Camera’s presence at NCTE. “They’re like, we can’t get rid of them … a security guard was there at my panel on building empathy through picture books”.

“Once I was on these conservative social media channels, the onslaught was unrelenting,” Moushabeck said. Camera had written “five separate articles” about her, “and when you Google me, some of the first articles that come up” are from them. “I noticed that when people were criticizing my book, they were pulling direct quotes from those articles.”

And for new authors such as Jenan Matari, the cancellations are about more than book talks and school visits – they are about who gets to tell their own stories. The pressure campaigns, the threats, the social media monitoring and the overarching bans have only reinforced what she already knew: that some voices are still seen as too dangerous to be heard.

“They couldn’t stop people from reading about Palestine,” she said. “So now they’re trying to stop people from meeting the authors who write about it.”

• This story was amended on 9 October 2025. An earlier version reported an event was cancelled because of Jenan Matari’s book when it was because of controversy about her social media posts.