After completing her first novel at age six—a diluvian thriller entitled The Animals’ Flood—Nancy Clare Morgan knew she wanted nothing else but to write. Since then, Nancy Clare has enjoyed a career path that one law school classmate generously referred to as having "an interesting trajectory" and that her husband, who should know better, calls "all over the map." But storytelling and the written, spoken, and visualized word—studying, promoting, crafting, teaching, engaging audiences with, and analyzing the future thereof—has been her central purpose in every endeavor.

 

Since 2018, Nancy Clare has been learning and developing every day as she communicates about learning and talent development for a global management consulting firm. After five years, she is grateful, not only for the host of new skills she has built in such a fast-paced and innovative environment but also for the language immersion experience. Words and phrases such as change management, day-one hypothesis, critical path, value-add, and MECE are now part of her professional vocabulary.

 

Joining a firm of nearly 40,000 was quite a change (a welcome one for an extrovert) from Nancy Clare's years running a communication services firm of one, creating and consulting on content for corporate, small business, non-profit, and academic clients. From her mile-high home base, she also enjoyed leading digital and media literacy workshops for tweens and their parents, as well as taking on a variety of creative writing projects.

 

Nancy Clare has an A.B. from Princeton University in the most practical of all majors, Comparative Literature, and began her professional life at Goldberg McDuffie Communications, a boutique public relations firm that specializes in strategic communications support for publishers, authors, and literary nonprofits. It was at GMC that Nancy Clare received an intensive tutorial in the power of media and learned to write press releases and author bios (which explains this self-authored, yet oddly third-person, account of her career). Fulfilling her theatre-kid dreams of being on Broadway one day, Nancy Clare moved in-house with Broadway Books, then a new division of Bantam Doubleday Dell, then a subsidiary of Random House pre-Penguin. There she orchestrated publicity campaigns for a variety of bestsellers in the genres of sports and religion—classifications with a great deal of overlap for somoene born in ACC/SEC country—including those by Tennessee Lady Vols coach Pat Summit, former Alabama coach Gene Stallings, former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne, Olympic gold-medalist Mary Lou Retton, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills.

A desire to understand the world of media beyond book publishing inspired a return to academia to study the intersections of law, journalism, policy, technology, and culture at Columbia University. While there, Nancy Clare spent a summer as a public service fellow at the Media Law Resource Center and acquired her favorite First Amendment-themed t-shirt (yes, she has many), which asks, "Which part of 'No Law' don't you understand?"

With her J.D. from Columbia in one hand and the self-help book What to Do with a Law Degree in the other, she relocated from New York to Charlotte, where she accepted a position as speechwriter for the President of Bank of America's Consumer and Small Business Bank. On her first day, Bank of America reported record earnings for 2006, a headline that would not be repeated until after she left the company. (At this point in the story, Nancy Clare asks that you remember the difference between correlation and causation.) Her front-row seat during the build-up to—and aftermath of—the 2008 financial crisis provided Nancy Clare with the deep understanding of subprime mortgage-backed securities that she had been hoping to avoid since majoring in comparative literature.

 

This may be why she returned to her happy place—a college campus—to teach Media Law & Ethics to undergraduates during her lunch hours. Soon thereafter she joined the faculty of the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte, where she remained until moving to Denver, where the humidity was lower and the skiing better, in 2012.