Join us for a special virtual presentation about book banning, featuring Ron Charles and Maureen Corrigan!
The special presentation will be preceded by the 2026 annual meeting for members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.
2026 Annual Meeting
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
5:30 p.m.
Virtual (link TBA)
We hope you can make it to our annual meeting to discuss the many events, activities, and opportunities we are planning for 2026!
Unfit for Shelves? A Love Letter to Banned Books
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
6 p.m.
Virtual (link TBA)
As we mourn news that book reading (not to mention book reviewing!) is declining across America, some books are being actively removed from shelves. Are these books really unfit for our public libraries, schools, and other institutions? If not, what is the deeper meaning behind why the public is being preventing from reading them?
Ron Charles and Maureen Corrigan will discuss this unfortunately timely topic—and offer a love letter to banned books everywhere.
Ron Charles, formerly a full-time writer for The Washington Post, where he covered books and produced the weekly Book Club newsletter, is now writing about books on Substack (subscribe here). He came to the Post in 2005 and became the editor of Book World in 2016. In 2010 he began a series of video book reviews for the Post called “The Totally Hip Video Book Review,” a satirical look at current books in the news and the art of book reviewing which sometimes features his wife, high school English teacher Dawn Charles. Once a month, he also hosts “The Book Report” on CBS TV’s Sunday Morning. A native of Missouri and a graduate of Washington University, prior to coming to the Post, for seven years he was editor of the book section of The Christian Science Monitor; and from 2013 to 2020, he hosted “Life of a Poet,” an interview series co-sponsored by the Library of Congress. In 2008, he received the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for book reviews and 1st place for A&E Coverage from the American Society for Features Journalism; in 2014 he served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and in 2018 he won the Louis Shores Award for excellence in reviewing from the American Library Association.
Maureen Corrigan is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in the social criticism of John Ruskin and William Morris. She received her B.A. in English from Fordham University. For the past 35 years, Corrigan has been the weekly book critic on the Peabody Award-winning NPR program, ”Fresh Air.”
She has received the 2023 John Seigenthaler “Legends Award,” the 2023 Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Reviewing from Washington Monthly Magazine, The National Book Critics Circle 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and The 1999 Edgar Award in Criticism.
Her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review.. Her literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading (Random House) was published in 2005. Her book The Canon of the Banned will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2028.
