The Honorable Jon Parrish Peede is a senior fellow at Common Sense Society and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.), a federal grant-making agency. Nominated by President Donald J. Trump and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Chairman Peede awarded more than $500 million to universities, museums, libraries, scholars, and cultural nonprofits nationwide. He has served in an ex officio capacity on boards of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and other federal bodies. His previous positions include publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, literature grants director at the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.), counselor to N.E.A. Chairman Dana Gioia, and director of the N.E.A.’s Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience program. In addition to writing speeches and proclamations for President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, he is the co-editor of Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction. He has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The New York Times, Stars & Stripes, Inside Higher Education, NPR, Bloomberg Radio, BBC, CSPAN, PBS, and other media outlets. He completed his B.S. at Vanderbilt University and M.A. at the University of Mississippi. He is the visiting writer in residence at Mississippi Valley State University, a public HBCU institution.