Newsweek Managing Editor To Speak at Baylor Inauguration

April 19, 2006

Media contact: Lori Fogleman, director of media relations, (254) 710-6275
More information about the Inauguration of Baylor University President John M. Lilley can be found by calling the inauguration office at (254) 710-1437.

Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, will deliver the keynote address at the inauguration of Baylor University President John M. Lilley at 2 p.m. Friday, April 21, in the Ferrell Center.
The ceremony is free and open to the public. A shuttle service to the Ferrell Center will be available for guests wishing to park at the East Campus Parking Facility on Daughtrey Avenue between Second and Third streets. 

While visiting Baylor for Lilley's inauguration, Meacham will sign copies of his latest book, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation, from 10 to 11 a.m. Friday at the Baylor Bookstore on Fifth Street on the Baylor campus. Former Baylor head football coach Grant Teaff also will be on hand to sign copies of his latest book, Grant Teaff with the Master Coaches.
Meacham joined Newsweek as a writer in January 1995, became national affairs editor in June of that year, and was named managing editor in November 1998. He supervises the magazine's coverage of politics, international affairs and breaking news, and has written cover stories on politics, religion, race, guns in America and the death of Ronald Reagan. In 2001, Newsweek won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence - the industry's highest honor - for its coverage of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In 2003, the magazine won the award again for its coverage of President Bush and the Iraq War.
Meacham spoke at Baylor on Oct. 26, 2004, on his book, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, when he delivered the Ferguson-Clark Author Lecture, benefiting Baylor Libraries. Franklin and Winston, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, was published by Random House on Oct. 21, 2003, and spent 12 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. The New York Times said the book was "written with grace and conviction," while The Los Angeles Times named it a book of the year. Meacham also won The Churchill Centre's 2005 Emery Reves Award for the best book of the year on Winston Churchill and the William H. Colby Military Writers' Symposium's Book of the Year Award. The paperback edition of Franklin and Winston was a New York Times bestseller for nine weeks.
Meacham also has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World. In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Random House), a collection of distinguished nonfiction essays about the mid-century struggle against Jim Crow.
A contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, Meacham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a communicant of St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, where he serves on the Vestry of the 180-year-old Episcopal parish. He also is a member of the Board of Regents of The University of the South, the Vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street, the Leadership Council of the Harvard Divinity School, and the National Advisory Group of Washington National Cathedral. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 2005.
Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham graduated from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., with a degree summa cum laude in English literature. In addition, he was salutatorian and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He began his career at The Chattanooga Times.
Meacham's newest book, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, was published by Random House on April 11, 2006. He also is at work on a biography of Andrew Jackson and his White House circle. Meacham and his wife, Keith, the executive director of the Harlem Day Charter School, live in New York City with their two children.