Banned Books Week—September 22nd to 28th—is an annual celebration of the freedom to read, and the aspiration that books should be accessible to all. In recognition of Banned Books Week 2024, 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, Haymarket will donate one book to someone who is incarcerated for every book purchased from this reading list until the end of September.

Books are for everyone! Abolish prisons!

For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s writing over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation.

Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.

A collection of illuminating interviews with leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers, reflecting on the uprisings of summer 2020, the rise of #defund, and the work ahead of bridging the divide between reform and abolition. 

Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic—and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences.

When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here.

In this urgent and incisive collection of new interviews bookended by two new essays, Marc Lamont Hill critically examines the “pre-existing conditions” that have led us to this moment of crisis and upheaval, guiding us through both the perils and possibilities, and helping us imagine an abolitionist future.

Black Panther and Cuban exile Assata Shakur has inspired generations of radical protest, including the contemporary movement for Black lives. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration.

A rigorous and defiant poetry collection that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature. 

In the early years of the twentieth century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 150,000 miners took part in one of the most critical events in the history of US labor organizing. The brutal response by the state of Pennsylvania—as well as the federal government—inaugurated the structure and power of policing that we know today.

Based on the events of the historic 2013 California prison hunger strike, Flying Kites is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel about resilience, forgiveness, hope, and what it means to find your own voice.

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.