F253. The National Book Critics Circle on the Art of Criticism

Ballroom C, Washington Convention Center, Level Three
Friday, February 10, 2017
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

Four leading literary critics—Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Margo Jefferson, whose new book Negroland won an NBCC award in 2016; NPR critic Maureen Corrigan, winner of an Edgar Award for Criticism; Ron Charles and Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post, both winners of the NBCC’s Balakian Award for criticism—discuss the fresh ways critics are writing about books today, including the new hybridity. All represent criticism as a provocative activity, all are always in search of something new to say.


Participants

Moderator:

Tom Beer is the books and travel editor at Newsday, where he has worked since 2007. He is the president of the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and a former editor at Out magazine.

Margo Jefferson was an arts critic for the New York Times. Her writing has been widely anthologized, and has appeared in New York, Guernica, the Believer, the Nation, and Newsweek. She received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her memoir, Negroland, received a 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ron Charles is the editor of Book World at The Washington Post, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and an NBCC board member. Before moving to DC, he edited the books section of The Christian Science Monitor in Boston.

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, is critic in residence and professor of the practice at Georgetown University and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. She is the author of So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures and Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading!

Carlos Lozada is nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post and winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Before joining the Post in 2005, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy and a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University. A native of Lima, Peru, he is an adjunct professor of political science in the University of Notre Dame’s Washington semester program.

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