MVSU Writer-In-Residence To Lead Ohio University, Seminary
Jon Peede, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rev. Nancy Hollomon-Peede pose with their daughter, Somerset Peede, center. The family is moving to Ohio in June, where he will assume the presidency of Ashland University and Ashland Theological Seminary.
Jon Peede and his wife, the Rev. Nancy Hollomon-Peede, will be moving from Greenwood to Ashland, Ohio, where he will become the 31st president of Ashland University and Ashland Theological Seminary.
Peede, who ordinally is from Brandon, was the chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities from 2017 to 2021, and he currently is a writer-in-residence at Mississippi Valley State University.
The Peedes moved to Greenwood from Virginia in September 2021.
“We will deeply miss our friends in Greenwood,” Jon Peede said Wednesday. “Nancy has treasured her time as a volunteer at the Community Food Pantry and Greenwood Community Center, and I have loved serving on the Greenwood Little Theatre board. And our spiritual lives have been enriched by the First Presbyterian and Nativity congregations.”
Hollomon-Peede has been a spiritual director and minister for various denominations and churches during her 35-year career in ministry. She also served as a chaplain at Harvard University. She and her husband have a daughter, Somerset, who is pursuing a postgraduate viola performance degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Australia.
Jon Peede expressed appreciation to friends at MVSU. “I cannot thank Mississippi Valley Provost Kathie Stromile Golden and Dr. John Zheng enough for hiring me to join a team of dedicated educators. The MVSU faculty, staff and students welcomed me with open arms,” he said.
“I will begin the new position on June 1. We will be back and forth to Greenwood over the summer as we move,” he said.
A press release from Ashland University explained why its board selected Peede.
“With more than 25 years in leadership positions in higher education and federal agencies, Peede brings a diverse set of experiences to Ashland. He has been a faculty member, fundraiser, public speaker, fiscally sound manager and strategic communicator. He is a proven consensus builder and thoughtful leader who develops relationships with a variety of stakeholders to achieve common goals,” the release said.
The release also reported that Peede, as chairman of the National Endowment, had sole authority of awarding approximately 1,000 annual grants and managed a $237 million annual budget and 170-person full-time staff. He awarded $500 million in support of liberal arts education, undergraduate and graduate curriculum innovation, museum and library programming, documentary films and multimedia works, cultural infrastructure projects and humanities scholarship.
Peede’s professional career has included time at the University of Virginia, where he was the publisher of the award-winning “Virginia Quarterly Review,” a national journal of literature and discussion. At the National Endowment for the Arts, he served as director of “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,” director of literature grants and counselor to then-NEA chairman Dana Gioia. At Millsaps College, Peede was the director of communications, and at Mercer University Press he edited academic books. A scholar of Southern literature, he is co-editor of the essay collection “Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction.”
Peede holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Vanderbilt University and a master’s in Southern studies from the University of Mississippi, and he will complete a doctorate in the teaching of English from Murray State University in May 2025.
He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and American Mensa.