Banned Books Week—September 18th to 24th—is an annual celebration of the freedom to read, and the aspiration that books should be accessible to all. For Banned Books Week 2022, Haymarket is highlighting the unjust censorshop of political books which impacts countless incarcerated readers each year. 

We've put together a Books Are For Everyone reading list: ten books that reflect the spectrum of urgent writing often targeted for censorship by prisons across the country.

As part of our Books Not Bars program, this Banned Books week Haymarket will donate one book to someone who is incarcerated for every book purchased from this reading list.

Books are for everyone! Abolish prisons!

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.

“This is one of the best books on writing that I've ever read. I couldn't put it down.”
—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow 

A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists. 

A celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. 

This timely and urgent book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged in recent years to challenge the bipartisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. 

 Violent Order explores the everyday practices of police and policing as modes of violence in the fabrication of social order.

An urgent and accessible analysis of the key structures of state violence in our world today, and a clarion call to action for their abolition. 

In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there.

This updated and expanded edition of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 's groundbreaking book features a new chapter and a foreword by Angela Y. Davis.

A lively, accessible, and timely guide to Capitalism for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%.

Haymarket's Books Not Bars program connects people who are incarcerated with radical books and opportunities for political education. Find out more about our Books Not Bars program, make a donation, and/or request books for loved ones inside here.