A Note on Annette Y. Kirk

Annette Y. Kirk is president of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and publisher of the cultural quarterly The University Bookman. She is also vice-president of the Wilbur Foundation and director of their residential Fellows Program.

Mrs. Kirk is a board member of the Midland Charter Initiative and the Education Freedom Fund, which awards scholarships to low-income students in Michigan Schools. She has served for some years as an advisor to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and to the Heritage Foundation’s Russell Kirk Memorial Lecture Series. In 2002 she was appointed to the board of the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.

Annette Kirk received her Bachelor of Arts degree and an honorary doctor of letters from Molloy College. She taught English and Drama in a New York public high school and did graduate work in theater at Queen’s College, in literature at St. John’s University, and in education at Columbia University.

A native New Yorker, Mrs. Kirk moved to the village of Mecosta, Michigan in 1964 when she married Russell Kirk. While raising their four daughters and acting as lecture agent for her husband, she founded the Mecosta County Council for the Arts, restored a one-room schoolhouse, and served as Chairman of the Mecosta Country Board of Social Services.

President Ronald Reagan appointed Annette Kirk to the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which in 1983 published the landmark report, A Nation at Risk, elevating educational issues to national prominence. Since then, she has encouraged our educational and political leaders to consider to what purpose we are educating our youth, and whether true education can exist without a moral dimension.

During her thirty-year marriage to Russell Kirk, they gave joint lectures, campaigned for political candidates, and hosted thousands of students at seminars held in The Russell Kirk Center library where Russell Kirk wrote almost all of his thirty-two books over a period of forty years.

• Mrs. Kirk gave this talk to the Philadelphia Society at a May 2004 luncheon.

Copyright © 2002–2004 The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.