Lecture Date: Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter and a weekly contributor to the WSJ books pages. At the Journal, she writes about biographies, histories, audiobooks, fiction, technology and social science, with a lively eye to the quirks and delights of domestic life. She brings to her work a humane sensibility that is grounded in traditional respect for language and literature. In two earlier decades as the Journal’s children’s book reviewer, she commented on cultural trends in books for young people while also seeking to identify and highlight works of lasting value.

Meghan is the author of the forthcoming memoir Free Range Girl, which tells of her experiences going “back to the land” in rural Maine with her father in 1976-77. She is also a passionate and authoritative advocate for reading aloud; as the mother of five, she’s had ample practice. Her 2019 book, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, a prize-winning work of nonfiction currently available in six languages, soon to be seven.

Meghan and her husband, the English journalist Hugo Gurdon, divide their time between Maryland and Maine.