Vonnegut Estate, Authors, and Student Plaintiffs Take Utah to Court Over the Freedom to Read

SALT LAKE CITY – Today, the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah Foundation, Inc. (ACLU of Utah), alongside law firms Parr Brown Gee & Loveless and Spencer Fane, LLC, filed a lawsuit in United States District Court for the District of Utah on behalf of the Estate of Kurt Vonnegut, award-winning authors Elana K. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins, and Amy Reed, and two anonymous Utah public high school students. By disregarding the literary value of age-appropriate books and removing them, Utah is trampling on the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, originally passed in 2022 and then amended in 2024, requires public schools and their libraries to remove a remarkable range of literature under unconstitutional, overbroad criteria imposed by the state legislature. Among the books removed are major award-winning and best-selling works, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a National Book Award winner and one of Time Magazine’s “100 Best English-Language Novels,” and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Many of the banned titles target voices that have historically been silenced, authors of color, women, and LGBTQ+ writers. These removals include Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner; Elana K. Arnold’s What Girls Are Made Of, a National Book Award finalist; and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a Pulitzer Prize nominee whose author received both the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Utah is now part of a nationwide trend in which states enact laws that censor information, ideas, and lived experiences in public K–12 classrooms. These laws undermine students’ fundamental freedoms by denying them access to the books and literature they depend on to learn, grow, and understand themselves and the world around them.

For the Author Plaintiffs, the law impermissibly restricts authors’ right to share information, ideas, and lived experiences through their constitutionally protected works.

“In 1975, my father Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five was among eleven books removed from library shelves in a New York school district, leading to a landmark victory in the U.S. Supreme Court case Board of Education, Island Trees School District v. Pico,” said Nanette Vonnegut, daughter of author Kurt Vonnegut. “He regarded libraries and librarians as our most vital public institutions because ‘words are the most powerful tools we have.’ Now, more than half a century later, Utah’s lawmakers’ determination to ban books like Slaughterhouse-Five denies innumerable young people in Utah the freedom to read, think, and grow; it is antithetical to what my father fought for during World War II and focused much of his literary legacy on addressing.”

Kurt Vonnegut was influenced by the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, which he witnessed as a prisoner of war. These experiences informed his characteristic use of ambiguity, irony, dark humor, and a hatred of dogma throughout his works. Vonnegut consistently supported the exposure of young people to challenging and authentic materials as a means to promote critical thinking and a deeper comprehension of meaning.

“The right to read and the right to free speech are inseparable. The First Amendment protects our freedom to read, learn, and share ideas free from unconstitutional censorship,” said Tom Ford, Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Utah. “This law censors constitutionally protected books, silences authors, and denies students access to ideas, in violation of the First Amendment rights of students and authors alike, and must be struck down.”

“For many Utah students, the first place we recognize our own lives and identities is in a library book. When those books disappear, students notice immediately. It sends a clear message about whose stories matter and whose do not,” said one of the student plaintiffs. “Book bans do more harm than simply removing stories. Empty shelves cost us understanding and connection, turning schools from places of learning into systems of control. Censorship does not just make ideas disappear, but also makes schools more confusing and dangerous because of its chilling effect on our right to learn."

View a copy of the complaint here.

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