Instruction librarians are experts at developing one-shot instruction sessions where information literacy concepts are explored in little more than an hour. Serving in a “guest star” role, we arrive as expert visitors within a classroom with an already established curriculum and culture. However, more universities and colleges are presenting librarians opportunities to teach semester-long courses, challenging many to transition from this one-shot planning model to building and teaching a credit-bearing, multi-unit course. By crafting, organizing, and teaching a full course, librarians can not only grow and diversify their skills in the classroom, but also open up new avenues of impact that academic libraries can have on our campus. This poster will provide a case study of one academic librarian’s efforts to develop and teach a semester-long, credit-bearing course on the timely topic of banned books and detail her course development process. She will share a model of curriculum planning based on backwards design principles, strategies to incorporate active learning and critical pedagogy, and insights on developing a positive and productive classroom culture. This poster will also seek to empower instruction librarians to recognize the expertise beyond information literacy instruction they hold that could be shared through a credit-bearing course. Presented at the 2023 65th NCLA Biennial Conference.