About

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 of domestic life. She brings to her work a humane sensibility grounded in traditional respect for language and literature.  Previously, over two decades as the Journal’s children’s book critic, she commented on cultural trends in books for young people while seeking to highlight works of lasting value.  

Meghan’s forthcoming memoir “Free Range Girl,” publishing October 20th, tells of her experiences in the mid-1970s going “back to the land” in rural Maine with her father.  An ardent an authoritative advocate of reading aloud – with five children, she’s had plenty of experience – Meghan is also the author of “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction” (2019), an award-winning work of nonfiction soon to be available in seven languages.

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