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.

Annette Y. Kirk

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.

Mrs. Kirk was a board member of the Midland Charter Initiative and the Education Freedom Fund, which awards scholarships to low-income students in Michigan Schools. She 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.

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.

Selected lectures by Annette Kirk

Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination.

Russell Kirk

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News and Events

Fall Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Fall 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of the new complete Kirk Bibliography, compiled by our archivist, Charles C. Brown. It also includes an interview with Márcia Xavier de Brito, who is translating many works of Kirk into Portuguese. You can download it, and past issues, here.

Jan 2012

Passages: Meijer

We are deeply sorry to learn of the death of Fred Meijer. Meijer was a philanthropist par excellence and beloved by all in Michigan who knew him. Readers interested in his life and legacy may be interested to see Jim Person’s review of his biography published in the University Bookman last year.

Dec 2011

Passages: Hoeflich

Annette Kirk and Jeffrey O. Nelson both contributed tributes to a memorial page for Mr. Charles H. Hoeflich (1914–2011), a long-time friend and financial supporter of the Kirk Center who died recently. The Kirk Center is deeply grateful for his support and commemorates a long and fruitful life.

Dec 2011

Kirk Audio at ISI

We commend to your attention the John M. Olin Online Lecture Library at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which hosts several lectures about Russell Kirk and his influence by scholars including Ted McAlister, Michael P. Federici, W. Wesley McDonald, George H. Nash, Gleaves Whitney, and Allan C. Carlson. It also hosts more than twenty-five audio lectures by Russell Kirk.

Dec 2011