The Eleanor Roosevelt Center, in partnership with PEN America, will bring the struggle over who gets to tell stories to the stage of the Bardavon on October 11. The 2025 Banned Book Awards celebrate those who resist censorship—authors, librarians, and activists who refuse to let reactionary politics erase voices from shelves.
The night’s marquee moment belongs to Margaret Atwood, who will be honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Lifetime Achievement Award. Atwood, whose 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale became a touchstone for imagining—and resisting—authoritarian futures, has spent her career confronting efforts to silence writers. That her work is routinely targeted by book banners is less irony than proof of concept. In accepting the award in person, Atwood embodies the event’s conviction that literature remains both shield and sword in the fight for human rights. She will be in conversation with WAMC’s Joe Donahue.
Atwood is hardly alone in this literary lineup. The Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Bravery in Literature will be presented to authors whose books have become flashpoints in the current wave of bans: Matthew A. Cherry and Vashti Harrison for the tender father–daughter picture book Hair Love; Juno Dawson for This Book Is Gay; John Green for the YA classic Looking for Alaska; Malinda Lo for her National Book Award–winning Last Night at the Telegraph Club; and Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell for the gentle penguin tale And Tango Makes Three. Each of these works has found itself on “restricted” lists for no crime greater than reflecting the lives of children, teenagers, and families as they are.
The Eleanor Roosevelt Literary Freedom Award will go to Becky Calzada, a Texas librarian and co-founder of the #FReadom Fighters, whose organizing helped galvanize a national pushback against censorship in schools. Calzada, like Atwood, reminds us that the defense of books is inseparable from the defense of readers.
Keynote speaker Jennifer Finney Boylan, author and current president of PEN America, will frame the evening alongside Deborah Caldwell Stone of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and Cameron Samuels of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). Together, they underscore that the movement to protect free expression spans generations: librarians, novelists, students, and icons like Atwood share the same stage because they share the same fight.
Book bans have surged in the last few years, targeting LGBTQ authors, writers of color, and works that dare to speak of racism, gender, or sexuality. The awards are not simply about handing out plaques; they are a roll call of resistance, a reminder that every title pulled from a classroom or library is also an attempt to narrow the horizon of possibility for young readers.
Atwood has said that “a word after a word after a word is power.” On October 11, in a Hudson Valley theater named for one of Roosevelt’s favorite performance venues, that power will be celebrated and renewed.
The 2025 Banned Book Awards
October 11, 7pm | Bardavon, Poughkeepsie
Presented by the Eleanor Roosevelt Center in partnership with PEN America. Sponsored by the Freedom to Read Foundation. Books available courtesy of Oblong Books. Tickets to the live event are $60-$80. The event can be live-streamed for $25.
