Crosby Kemper III - Chairman

Crosby Kemper III is the CEO of the Kansas City Public Library and former CEO of UMB Financial Corporation. Educated at Pem-Day, Andover, Eton, and Yale, he has taught English at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and been a bookseller in Grand Central Station in New York City. He is the editor of, and contributor to, Winston Churchill: Resolution, Defiance, Magnanimity, Good Will, published by the University of Missouri Press. In 2003-04, he chaired the Commission on the Future of Higher Education in Missouri for Gov. Bob Holden. He has served on the board of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello, and on the boards of the Kansas City Symphony, the Black Archives of Mid-America, Union Station, and Lapham's Quarterly. He helped Marilyn Strauss found the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival and served as its first board chair. He also founded and chaired the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. He cofounded and is chairman of the Show-Me Institute, a free-market public policy think tank for the state of Missouri. He received a 2008 Difference Maker Award from The Urban League of Kansas City. In 2008, he and the Kansas City Public Library received the Gold Medal for Libraries from the Institute for Museum and Library Services at the White House from former librarian Laura Bush.