Athens, Ga. – Amy Glennon, a University of Georgia alumna and first female publisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, will give the university’s undergraduate Commencement address on Dec. 13 in Stegeman Coliseum. The ceremony will begin at 9:30 a.m. with the graduate ceremony to follow at 2:30 p.m.
The university’s graduate Commencement will feature E. Culpepper “Cully” Clark, who served as dean of the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication from 2006 to June of this year.
Tickets are not required for the graduate exercise. For the undergraduate ceremony, commencement candidates are allowed six tickets per student.
Glennon held various roles in her 20 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before being named the newspaper’s top executive. She served as features editor, director of innovations, Gwinnett general manager, senior director of product and project management and vice president of circulation. In March 2012, she moved to the role of publisher, becoming the first woman to hold the title in the newspaper’s 145-year history.
“We are pleased to welcome distinguished graduates like Amy Glennon back to the University. She has served her alma mater very well in a number of important ways including most recently as a member of the Grady College Dean Search Committee,” said UGA President Jere W. Morehead. “As the publisher of one of America’s major daily newspapers, Amy Glennon represents UGA very well. I look forward to her comments at commencement.”
A graduate of the Grady College, Glennon spent three years on staff at the Red & Black student newspaper and is currently an emeritus member of the publication’s board of directors. She also is a member of the Georgia chapter of the International Women’s Forum.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Glennon serves as senior leader, currently reaches 1.7 million people each week through its print and online presence. The newspaper is a part of the Cox Media Group, a publishing, digital media and broadcasting subsidiary of the Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises.
Glennon and her husband Mike have two daughters, Kate and Abby. Glennon remains an avid Georgia Bulldogs fan, although, as she states in her bio, her role at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution requires her to sometimes limit her public expression of loyalty.
The graduate ceremony will include a Commencement address from Clark, who is dean and professor emeritus at both UGA and the University of Alabama. He is an authority on rhetoric and argumentation studies, Southern history and culture and civil rights and race relations.
Before his role as dean at the Grady College, Clark oversaw the University of Alabama’s College of Communication and Information Sciences for 10 years. He joined the UA faculty in 1971, held administrative posts in the University of Alabama System both in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham since 1979 and also was executive assistant to UA’s president from 1990 to 1996.
Clark has served on numerous editorial boards and is past president of the Southern States Communication Association. He founded and is co-general editor of the University of Alabama Press series “Studies in Rhetoric and Communication,” which includes more than 30 books.
Widely published in both history and communication, Clark’s books include “The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama” (Oxford University Press), which is listed among the notable books of 1993 by the New York Times Book Review, and a biography of Francis Warrington Dawson, founder and editor of the Charleston News and Courier, and Henry Grady’s chief rival as architect of the New South.
A native of Grady County, Clark received his doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Emory University.
UGA’s undergraduate ceremony will be shown live in Masters Hall of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. Both ceremonies will be broadcast live broadcast live on Channel 15 of the UGA and Charter cable systems as well as online at http://www.ctl.uga.edu/ctlcable. Undergraduate ommencement will broadcast on WUGA-TV on a tape delay on Dec. 14 at 3 p.m.
For more information on UGA’s Commencement ceremonies, see http://commencement.uga.edu/.
