President Trump Appoints Jon Parrish Peede as Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities

President Donald J. Trump has appointed Jon Parrish Peede as the Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Peede joined NEH in April and was the Senior Deputy Chairman of the agency. Previously, he had been appointed to senior leadership roles at the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2003 to 2007, he served as Counselor to NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. From 2007 to 2011, he oversaw the NEA’s funding of literary organizations and fellowships to creative writers and translators. For seven years, he led writing workshops for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Bahrain, England, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, the Persian Gulf, and on domestic bases.

His prior positions include publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, director of communications at Millsaps College, and editor at Mercer University Press with a focus on the humanities.

He has served on the national council of the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience, Jackson State University; the advisory committee of the Virginia Festival of the Book, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities; and the poet laureate selection committee, state of Mississippi, office of the governor.

Peede holds degrees from Vanderbilt University and the University of Mississippi and is the coeditor of Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction (Mercer, 2007).

Margaret F. Plympton, the former Acting Chair, will return to her role as Deputy Chair.