Lecture Date: Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a weekly columnist for the books pages of the Wall Street Journal, where she reviews new works on all sorts of topics: From biographies of the outlaw Belle Starr and the “Serpent Queen” Catherine de Medici to the life story of the actor James Gandolfini; from an exploration of the imagination of Charles Dickens to an assessment of the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder; from a paean to the Scottish Highlands to a history of the notebook.

Meghan often covers the intersection of culture and technology (lately reviewing new books from Jonathan Haidt, Christine Rosen, and Nicholas Carr), and she delights in writing about audiobooks. In early 2025, the WSJ published “The 20 Best Children’s Books of the Last 20 Years,” in which Meghan looked back over her two decades as the paper’s children’s book critic, in which capacity she commented on social and political trends in young people’s literature while seeking to identify and highlight works of lasting value.

Meghan is an ardent and authoritative advocate of reading out loud - with five children, she’s had plenty of practice – and in 2019 published “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction” (Harper), a prize-winning work of nonfiction which is currently available in six languages and, soon, in seven.

A former foreign correspondent and magna cum laude graduate of Bowdoin College, Meghan and her husband, the English journalist Hugo Gurdon, divide their time these days between Maryland and Maine.