The Uprise Books Project is dedicated to ending the cycle of poverty through literacy, providing new banned and challenged books to underprivileged teens free of charge. By providing them with new, free banned and challenged literature, we’ll establish the love of reading that will lead to increased literacy, higher rates of college attendance and more lucrative earning potential later in life.

So why focus on banned/challenged books? First, we simply don’t believe in censorship. As the American Library Association says, “Constitutionally protected speech cannot be suppressed solely to protect children or young adults from ideas or images a legislative body believes to be unsuitable for them.” We think that parents have a right and an obligation to monitor their own child’s access to literature they feel might be inappropriate, but they can’t control another child’s access. By banning and challenging books in schools and libraries, though, they’re doing exactly that.

More importantly, we think that the idea that these texts have been banned and challenged will motivate kids to actually read the things. A sixteen-year-old might not care that the Radcliffe Publishing Course called The Great Gatsby the best novel of the 20th century, but his inherent teen sense of rebellion might entice him to pick up a book challenged because of its “language and sexual references.”