Join the SJSU King Library and the San José Public Library — in partnership with the SJSU Pride Center, SJSU College of the Humanities & the Arts, SJSU Department of Humanities, SJSU Center for Steinbeck Studies, SJSU School of Information, Santa Clara City Library, California State Senator Dave Cortese, SJSU Department of English & Comparative Literature, SJSU Department of African American Studies, SJSU Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and the SJSU Artistic Excellence Programming Grants — as we celebrate Banned Books Week with a week's worth of events highlighting our right to read freely.
1984
Time: 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225
Join us to celebrate intellectual freedom and stand against censorship with a special screening of Michael Radford's 1984. This cinematic adaptation of George Orwell's novel offers a chilling look at a dystopian future where independent thought is suppressed, truth is manipulated, and every citizen is under constant surveillance. Light refreshments served.
Your Voice, Your Story
Time: 10:00am - 4:00pm
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center
Join us for Your Voice, Your Story, an immersive, hands-on event celebrating the freedom to read, create, and share stories during Banned Books Week. Explore a variety of interactive stations designed to amplify your voice and celebrate the power of storytelling in all its forms:
- Storyboard Station – Map out your personal narrative or a crucial event in your life and turn it into a scene or scenes using a collage method with words and imagery taken from recycled materials.
- Portraits Station – Express identity and individuality with artistic self-portraits or representations of authors and characters who’ve challenged censorship.
- Button Making – Design and create wearable buttons that express your favorite quotes, banned book titles, or your personal message of resistance.
- Video Booth – Record a message, book review, or spoken word piece. Share why your story—or someone else's—deserves to be heard.
- Short Edition Cube – Discover (and print!) a surprise short story or poem from a diverse collection of voices—including some that have faced bans or challenges.
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Digital Expression – Turn your story into pixels and personality with your own custom avatar.
This event is open to all ages. Whether you come to create, reflect, or simply explore, Your Voice, Your Story is your chance to take a stand for storytelling and intellectual freedom.
Freedom to Read in Virtual Reality
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location:Online (Zoom)
Recording coming soon!
We invite you to join us in our immersive VR space for the Freedom to Read Rally (framevr.io/freedom-to-read), a virtual demonstration and gathering in support of intellectual freedom. The event will feature Betsy Gomez of Unite Against Book Bans (UABB), Nick Higgins, Chief Librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library, and Tom Fay, Chief Librarian of the Seattle Public Library, representing Books Unbanned. They will be joined by Dr. Anthony Chow, Director of the San José State University School of Information, and John MacLeod, Director of XR Libraries, who will help lead the rally and discussion. Together, these leaders will deliver brief talks on the urgent state of book banning today, its projected impact on communities and libraries, and strategies for resistance, followed by youth from around the country sharing how they’ve been fighting banned books in their own communities. The rally will conclude with an open discussion, giving participants an opportunity to reflect, share, and stand united in affirming the fundamental freedom to read.
Presenters:
Anthony S. Chow, PhD, is Director and Professor of the School of Information at San José State University, where he leads programs in library and information science, archives, records, and data, as well as initiatives in digital literacy, human-centered AI, and XR technologies. An award-winning scholar and leader, Dr. Chow currently serves as President-Elect of the California Library Association and Vice-President/President-Elect of the Chinese American Library Association. His research and projects focus on equity, access, and community empowerment through technology and literacy, including global partnerships, XR cultural preservation, and the development of sustainable book ecosystems.
Tom Fay, Executive Director/Chief Librarian, A native of southern Nevada, Tom Fay’s 42-year career in libraries began in 1983 as a page, and he later held roles as Executive Director of Henderson Libraries and the Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of Las Vegas Clark County Library District in Nevada. After joining The Seattle Public Library as Director of Library Programs and Services in 2015, Fay was appointed to serve as Interim Chief Librarian in 2021, and in March 2022, the Library Board voted unanimously to select Fay as the new Executive Director and Chief Librarian. Fay holds a Fine Arts degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He has been awarded the O’Callaghan Public Sector Person of the Year and selected as Nevada’s Librarian of the Year. He enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter experiencing the great outdoors in the Pacific Northwest.
Betsy Gomez is a publishing professional with over two decades of experience as an editor, writer, designer, and project manager. She currently serves as an assistant director for the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, where she coordinates public outreach initiatives and develops digital resources to defend intellectual freedom. Betsy is also the long-time Coordinator of the Banned Books Week Coalition and previously served as Coalition and Editorial Director for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, where she collaborated with national partners to advance free expression and literacy. She is the editor of She Changed Comics, an award-winning history of women in comics, and continues to champion the freedom to read through advocacy, publications, and creative storytelling.
Nicholas Higgins is Chief Librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library, where he leads one of the nation’s largest public library systems in advancing equity, access, and lifelong learning. As the primary founder of Books Unbanned, he has championed national access to banned and challenged books, positioning libraries at the forefront of the fight for intellectual freedom. With more than a decade at BPL, he has overseen outreach services and innovative community engagement initiatives, particularly serving immigrants, youth, and justice-involved populations. Previously, he directed Correctional Services at The New York Public Library, expanding access to books and educational opportunities for incarcerated New Yorkers. A graduate of Hunter College and Pratt Institute, Nick has dedicated his career to leveraging libraries as engines of social change and advocates fiercely for the freedom to read and the essential role of libraries in democracy.
John MacLeod serves as Executive Director of XRLibraries, where he champions equitable access to cutting-edge technology by leading the installation of XR emerging technology systems and programs in underserved libraries, transforming how students experience immersive learning opportunities! John breaks down barriers between advanced XR technology and communities that need it most, creating pathways for hands-on exploration that traditional learning environments simply can't match. His dedication goes beyond just providing equipment – he builds comprehensive support systems that ensure every student can dive into virtual worlds, conduct interactive experiments, and engage with complex concepts through immersive experiences. By partnering with educational institutions and community organizations, John demonstrates how XR technology serves as a powerful bridge to knowledge, creativity, and career exploration. His work proves that innovative technology meets passionate advocacy for accessibility. The result is transformational for students preparing to launch their futures in our increasingly digital world!
Silent (Banned) Book Club
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location:Smith & Carlos Lawn
Join Kim Brillante Knight, PhD, Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in grabbing a banned book, or any book really. Pack your favorite blanket. And join us on the Smith & Carlos lawn for a silent reading experience. We’ll do 15 minutes of introductions / socializing. Then read quietly together for an hour. Then spend 15 minutes discussing what we read. This event is sponsored by the Department of Humanities.
Banned VR Experience
Time: 11:00am - 11:30am
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center
Join us for an immersive experience in the fight against censorship! Step into the Freedom to Read VR experience with the KLEVR lab; an interactive environment designed to engage, educate, and empower the public in standing against book bans. Explore five unique spaces dedicated to community engagement, promoting democratic values, celebrating cultural diversity, and advocating for educational equity and intellectual freedom. Learn how you can help protect access to challenged, restricted, or banned books. Together, we can champion intellectual freedom and the right to read!
Link to VR: Freedom to Read
Making Queer & Trans Worlds: YA and Speculative Fiction in Chaotic Times
Time: 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225 & Online (Zoom)
Recording
This panel will feature writers and scholars discussing the importance of young adult and speculative fiction for queer and trans folks, and their allies. In addition to professors Maite Urcaregui and Daniel Rivers, this panel will feature Mara Olivas, an MFA graduate from SJSU and the author of Sundown in San Ojuela (Lanternfish Press, 2024). The panel will feature discussions of the history of queer/trans YA and speculative fiction, as well as personal experiences coming into the genres, and reflections on the ways speculative genres connect to social movements, subcultural worlds, and queer and trans futures.
Presenters:
M. M. Olivas is an alumna of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the Lambda Literary Workshop, and has an MFA in creative writing and English literature from San Jose State University. An Ignyte finalist, and featured on the Stoker’s long list, Olivas’ fiction has appeared to critical acclaim in Uncanny, Apex, Weird Horror, and Bourbon Penn Magazine. As a trans, first-generation Chicana, she explores the intersection of queer and diasporic experiences in her fiction. Her debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela, portrays how Mexico’s indigenous and colonial pasts haunt the present. Olivas currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and in her free time, collects transforming robots.
Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies & Literature at San José State University, where they teach courses in environmental humanities, American studies, and literature, including queer and trans literature. Daniel is a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow in Creative Nonfiction, and their writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Terrain.org, Joyland, American Quarterly, Writing the Golden State, and is forthcoming in the collection Sex Change and the City. Daniel’s first book, titled California Futures, will be published by Duke University Press next year.
Maite Urcaregui (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature at San José State University. Her research and teaching explore Latinx and multiethnic U.S. literatures, visual cultures, and comics through feminist queer, and critical race frameworks. She is co-editor with Fernanda Díaz-Basteris of the edited collection Latinx Comics Studies, published with Rutgers University Press in 2025.
The Untold History of Latinos – Episode 1: Echoes of Empires
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225
In this documentary series, creator and host John Leguizamo goes on a quest to uncover Latino and Latina heroes and their contributions. Leguizamo takes viewers on a captivating journey, delving into both well-known and lesser-known stories of Latino history, spanning thousands of years, from the Ancient Empires to the present, and shining a light on the rich and often overlooked history of Latinos.
Book Discussion: 1984
Time: 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center
In celebration of Banned Books Week, we invite you to a thought-provoking discussion of George Orwell's enduring classic, 1984. Orwell's novel offers a chilling exploration of a dystopian future where independent thought is suppressed, truth is manipulated, and surveillance is absolute.
Banned VR Experience
Time: 11:00am - 11:30am
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center
Join us for an immersive experience in the fight against censorship! Step into the Freedom to Read VR experience with the KLEVR lab; an interactive environment designed to engage, educate, and empower the public in standing against book bans. Explore five unique spaces dedicated to community engagement, promoting democratic values, celebrating cultural diversity, and advocating for educational equity and intellectual freedom. Learn how you can help protect access to challenged, restricted, or banned books. Together, we can champion intellectual freedom and the right to read!
Link to VR: Freedom to Read
Academically Censored
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center& Online (Zoom)
Recording
Dr. Johnson will talk about the path to creating and exhibiting Transfuturism, an art exhibit that celebrates Black Trans joy, and ways to address academic censorship that stifles imagination, possibility, and futurity in a challenging political climate.
Presenter:
Dr. Amber Johnson is Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief of Staff in the Division of Equity & Inclusion at UC Berkeley. They are also Founding Director of the Justice Fleet, a mobile social justice museum that fosters healing through art dialogue and play and co-founder of The Institute for Healing Justice and Equity, where they specialize in humanizing equity and exploring the relationship between healing justice and equity. As a scholar, artist, and activist, Dr. Amber Johnson’s research and activism focus on narratives of identity, resistance, and social justice in digital media, popular media, and everyday lived experiences. As a leader, Dr. Johnson is a fierce advocate for health equity, healing justice, equitable community engagement, and radical imagination. Dr. Johnson’s forthcoming book, A Great Inheritance, is a young adult fiction novel and memoir project written to help people better support and love gender expansive folks. The manuscript follows five children charged with dismantling the gender binary and eventually, the genetic economy.
The Untold History of Latinos – Episode 2: Threads in the American Tapestry
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225
Explore how Latino DNA has been woven into the identity of the United States since before her inception, and has been pivotal all along the way. Despite facing severe discrimination and violence, Latinos were present and contributed in pivotal ways to the fabric of this nation. Highlighting key figures and events, host John Leguizamo shows how Latinos helped build the United States we know today.
Artificially Censored: New Frontiers in Censorship
Time: 10:00am - 11:00am
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center & Online (Zoom)
Recording
Using hands-on activities and demonstrations, this program will highlight the intersections between artificial intelligence, censorship, and the freedom of information. Legislation that bans whole categories of books has libraries looking for solutions, and some have even started using AI tools to try to comply with increasingly aggressive censorship. Similarly, AI is already being used by government and industry to make decisions in critical areas like law enforcement, healthcare, and employment. We will explore the inherent algorithmic bias in AI models and discuss the dangers of relying on AI and allowing algorithms to limit intellectual freedom and shape our lives.
Presenters:
Dykee Gorrell is the Digital and Data Literacy Librarian at San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library. She leads campus-wide initiatives in digital and data literacy and provides data services to support research across the university. She holds an MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and is an award-winning scholar and technologist; her 2020 paper, “Designing Trans Technology,” received the Best Paper Award at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. She is currently writing her first book, a critical history of information infrastructure that interrogates the colonial logics shaping how information is organized.
Sharesly Rodriguez is the Artificial Intelligence Librarian at San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, where she specializes in integrating, evaluating, and educating about artificial intelligence in academic libraries and on campus. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science and previously served as the UX Librarian, implementing the library’s first AI chatbot. With a background in UX research and a long-standing interest in AI, her work now includes consulting on AI research, projects, promoting AI literacy, and studying responsible AI use in higher education, with a focus on ethics, transparency, and equitable access.
Nick Szydlowski is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, where he is the work lead for the library’s Digital Scholarship Services department and an active contributor to the Digital Humanities Center. His research on the intersection of intellectual freedom and social justice has been published in the Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy and Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.
Black & Banned: A Lecture & Dialogue with Keenan Norris (Part 2)
Time: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: King Library, 1st Floor, Room 113/Digital Humanities Center& Online (Zoom)
Recording
Join Keenan Norris, PhD for an overview of WWII-era suppression of Black literature (Richard Wright, Chester Himes), this presentation will, additionally, visit the African American Policy Forum's data on current book bans, linking the current crackdown with times past. Actively engaging the audience, this presentation will examine the supremacist and imperialist logics that commonly undergird book bans.
Presenter:
Keenan Norris ’s latest book is Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings. Keenan’s novel The Confession of Copeland Cane won the 2022 Northern California Book Award and his essays have received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and Folio: Eddie Award. Keenan teaches English and Creative Writing at San José State University.
The Untold History of Latinos – Episode 3: Solidarity in a New Era
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225
In this documentary series, host John Leguizamo explores the rise of the new empire, the United States. While Latinos were often relegated to the fringes of mainstream society, they made profound contributions to the fabric of the U.S. and beyond. Reflecting on his journey, John learns that Latinos were not just an asterisk in history, but that Latino history is the history of the United States.
Banned Together: The Fight Against Censorship
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225
A diverse cast of visionary teenagers, stirring public protests, private threats, criminal charges, and drama-filled school board meetings: this is the explosive world of Banned Together.
The film pulls back the curtain on two of the most controversial issues in America today: book bans and curriculum censorship in public schools. Banned Together follows three students and their adult allies as they fight to reinstate 97 books suddenly pulled from their school libraries. As they evolve from local to national activists – meeting with bestselling/banned authors, politicians, Constitutional experts, and more – the film reveals the dark forces behind the accelerating wave of book bans in the U.S.
Freedom Under Fire: A Conversation About Democracy and Books
Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225 & Online (Zoom)
Join us for a powerful conversation between California State Senator Dave Cortese and former American Library Association President Patty Wong. These two leaders will discuss their work supporting intellectual freedom. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about the role of the government and those in power in combating censorship and protecting our right to read.
Presenters:
Senator Dave Cortese was elected in November 2020 to represent State Senate District 15, which encompasses much of the Silicon Valley as well as Morgan Hill and Gilroy. He earlier served as a Santa Clara County Supervisor, a San José City Councilmember, and an East Side Union High School District Board Trustee, which is where he began his public service career. Senator Cortese was an architect of the School Linked Services program, which connects students and families to county services. This initiative has been adopted by approximately 200 schools and has since been expanded statewide through legislation. He has also organized Community Bus Trips for Education for over two decades to bring education advocates, students, and educators from Santa Clara County to the State Capitol with the goal of connecting their voices directly to state decision-makers regarding education funding and policy. Senator Cortese opposes any kind of censorship of books. He is married to Pattie Cortese and has four children.
Patty Wong has been the City Librarian for Santa Clara City Library since October 2021. During her tenure she has taken the library through COVID recovery, dramatically increased library hours across three facilities, and introduced Sunday hours at Central Park Library. She is working with the Santa Clara Unified School District to get every third grader a library card. Wong has served in a variety of library positions since 1984 – in Berkeley, Oakland, Stockton, Yolo County and Santa Monica. She served as the President of the American Library Association from 2021-2022 and was the first Asian American to hold that post. Patty has also been a part-time instructor at the San José State School of Information since 2006, teaching grant writing, youth development, and serving underserved communities. She is a San Francisco native and a fourth generation Californian and received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UC Berkeley.
TeenHQ Theater Presents: THE HOBBIT
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Location: King Library, 2nd Floor, Room 225
TeenHQ Theater, in a special collaboration between SJPL and SJSU to honor Banned Book Week 2025 performs THE HOBBIT with its first intergenerational cast.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a notoriously banned book for its magical themes. Most notably it was banned in 2001 in Alamagordo, New Mexico by a Christian rights group that held a book burning, claiming the book was satanic.
Bilbo Baggins is a comfortably well-off hobbit with a love for rousing adventure stories. Real adventures, however, are definitely not his cup of tea. So when Gandalf the wizard knocks at Bilbo’s door, bringing with him Thorin Oakenshield, 11 ragged looking dwarfs and a contract for an adventure to recover the lost treasure of Lonely Mountain, Bilbo could not be less interested—at first. But Bilbo’s love of a good story gets the better of him, and before he knows it, he is off on a perilous quest over mountain and under hill through caves and forest and slimy dark places.
(Appropriate for a General Audience)
