Banned Books Week Conversation on Censorship with Carolina Public Humanities

Join Chapel Hill Public Library and Carolina Public Humanities for a conversation about intellectual freedom and the dangers of censorship during Banned Books Week. Topics to be covered by panelists include:

• Professor Tori Ekstrand from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism will discuss free speech, censorship, and media law.
• NC Deputy Director Renee Sekel of Red Wine and Blue, a national advocacy network of Democratic suburban parents, will discuss their campaign against book bans.

Banned Books Week is an annual, national celebration of your freedom to read, held September 18 – 24 this year. The theme of this year's event is “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us."

About Renee Sekel

Renee is the Deputy NC Program Director for Red Wine & Blue, which helps to channel the diversity and power of suburban women into political action.  RWB helps suburban women organize their friends and family to be familiar with the issues and to vote. Their Book Ban Busters campaign has been teaching women to fight back against demands to ban books in our school and local libraries. In addition to her work with Red Wine & Blue, Renee has been an advocate for the public schools since 2017, and informs NC's citizens about education issues and how they can get involved in advocacy through the podcast she co-hosts, Advocacy Bites.

About Tori Ekstrand

Victoria "Tori" Smith Ekstrand has been a media law and free expression scholar for more than two decades. Before that, she worked as a senior executive for The Associated Press at its headquarters in New York City. She is currently serving a three-year term at the UNC Graduate School as the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education, where she leads UNC’s premier doctoral fellows program and its annual Royster Global conference with UNC’s strategic global partners.