Chantilly, VA- Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) today announced that Dr. Maya Angelou will deliver the WICT Leadership Conference’s opening keynote. Anne Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO of Xerox will close the conference. The 2008 WICT Leadership Conference will take place March 5-6, 2008 at the Hilton New York.
The WICT Leadership Conference is the premier venue for established and emerging women leaders working in cable television, broadband content creation, and high speed internet and telephone distribution. The inaugural WICT Leadership Conference, held in March 2007, was attended by 600 of the best and brightest women in the industry. Further information on conference content will be posted on the WICT website mid September.
Dr. Maya Angelou
Dr. Maya Angelou is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary black literature and as a remarkable Renaissance woman. A mesmerizing vision of grace, swaying and stirring when she moves, Dr. Angelou captivates her audiences lyrically with vigor, fire and perception. She has the unique ability to shatter the opaque prisms of race and class between reader and subject throughout her books of poetry and her autobiographies.
Dr. Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis was raised in segregated rural Arkansas. She is a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director. She lectures throughout the U.S. and abroad and is a lifetime Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina since 1981. She has authored twelve best selling books and numerous magazine articles earning her Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations. In 1993, Angelou became the second poet in US History to have the honor of writing and reciting original work at the Presidential Inauguration. On the Pulse of Morning, at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration, was an occasion that gave her wide recognition for which she was awarded a Grammy award (best spoken word).
Dr. Angelou, who speaks French, Spanish, Italian and West African Fanti, began her career in drama and dance. She married a South African freedom fighter and lived in Cairo where she was editor of The Arab Observer, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East. In Ghana, she was feature editor of The African Review and taught at the University of Ghana.
Dr. Angelou, poet, was among the first African-American women to hit the bestsellers lists with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , a chronicle of her life up to age sixteen (and ending with the birth of her son, Guy), which was published in 1970 with great critical and commercial success.
In the sixties, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in 1975 she received the Ladies Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in communications. She received numerous honorary degrees and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on the Observance of International Woman's Year and by President Ford to the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Advisory Council. She is on the board of the American Film Institute and is one of the few female members of the Director's Guild.
In the film industry, through her work in script writing and directing, Dr. Angelou has been a groundbreaker for black women. In television, she has made hundreds of appearances. Her best-selling autobiographical account of her youth, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, won critical acclaim in 1970 and was a two-hour TV special on CBS. She has written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including Afro-Americans in the Arts, a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. She was also nominated for an Emmy Award for her acting in Roots, and her screenplay Georgia, Georgia, which was the first by a black woman to be filmed. In theatre, she produced, directed and starred in Cabaret for Freedom in collaboration with Godfrey Cambridge at New York's Village Gate; starred in Genet's The Blacks at St Mark's Playhouse; and adapted Sophocles Ajax, which premiered in Los Angeles in 1974.
Anne Mulcahy
Xerox Corporation, one of the most enduring brands in business today, is the global leader in document management solutions with $16 billion in annual revenues. At its helm is Anne Mulcahy, a 30-year veteran of Xerox who began her career selling copiers, and who has, over the last few years, led the company through a massive transformation -- reinventing Xerox into an innovative technology and services enterprise that helps businesses deploy Smarter Document Management™ strategies and find better ways to work. Building on Xerox's rich heritage of social responsibility, Mulcahy ensures that the company's business decisions and actions are aligned with a clear set of corporate values.
Mulcahy and her team are responsible for an aggressive, multibillion-dollar turnaround plan that returned Xerox to profitability - significantly improving the company’s financial position and expanding its portfolio of systems and services. By maintaining an investment in innovation, Xerox has completely overhauled its product line, winning share in key segments of the market. In addition, the company launched Xerox Global Services, offering content management, imaging and consulting services. The combination of innovative technology and value-added services has delivered strong results, prompting MONEY Magazine to dub Xerox "the great turnaround story of the post-crash era – an IBM for the 2000s."
Anne Mulcahy was named CEO of Xerox on Aug. 1, 2001, and chairman on Jan. 1, 2002. Mulcahy most recently was Xerox president and chief operating officer from May 2000 through July 2001. She began her Xerox career as a field sales representative in 1976 and assumed increasingly responsible sales and senior management positions. In addition to the Xerox board, Mulcahy is a board director of Citigroup Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Target Corporation, and is the chairman of the corporate governance task force of the Business Roundtable. She is also a board member of Catalyst, a nonprofit organization supporting women in business.
About WICT
For over twenty-five years, WICT has partnered with cable and telecommunications leaders to provide leadership programs and services, and create professional advancement opportunities for women. With over 6,000 members, Women in Cable Telecommunications is the oldest and largest professional association serving women in the cable and telecommunications industry. WICT develops women leaders who transform our industry through highly regarded professional events, educational programming and networking opportunities. WICT has 20 local chapters and satellites across the country. For more information, visit www.wict.org.
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