Medford Happenings

Monday, May 18, 7-8pm

We all have thoughts and feelings about the rise of book bannings in America so this is a great opportunity to have a discussion about it! Join author and professor, Samuel Cohen, for a conversation on his most recent release, Banning Books in America: Not a How-to, which is a book about banned books in the U.S. – about reading them, teaching them, and lending them under the shadow of political pressure not to. Bring your questions as Sam will have answers (or, at least, thoughtful responses that will make us think) to them. We hope you can join us for this important topic. 

Click here to register for this program!

RECORDING NOTE: This program will be recorded and the video will be available for two (2) weeks. All registrants will receive the recording via email within 48 hours of the program. 

About the Book:

Banning Books in America features novelists on banning and being banned, arguments about the histories and politics of book banning, readings of banned books in national and international contexts, and responses to new legislation by anti-censorship advocates, teachers, and librarians. Together, these writers and educators provide a view from the trenches of the wars on reading. They offer, if not a single blueprint, models for how to think about what it means to ban books and how to fight back against the forces that would ban them.

This book shows that at the heart of this issue is the question of what books mean to people. Some Americans are determined to decide which books other Americans shouldn’t get to read. Why these books? Why now? Anyone who seeks to answer these questions must examine the context, historical and current, in which Americans allow this to happen.

This is a book about book banning in America, and so it is a book about America.

About the presenter:

Samuel Cohen (Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri) is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (University of Iowa Press, 2009), co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012), co-editor (with James Peacock) of The Clash Takes on the World: Transnational Perspectives on the Only Band That Matters (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), and Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture. He is also author of 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, 5th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016), and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience, 13th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018). Banning Books in America: Not a How-To is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in February 2026.

This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Ashland Public Library and we’re happy to be collaborating with the John Curtis Free Library in Hanover, MA as well as the Tewksbury Public Library to bring this program to our communities. We are thrilled to be partnering with the Ashland Senior Center for this event.