Amy Dickinson will be the featured speaker at the 5th Annual Power of the Purse luncheon, June 15, 2010.

Dickinson’s syndicated “Ask Amy” column appears in over 200 newspapers nationwide. She is a regular panelist on the popular radio current events quiz show, Wait,Wait, Don’t Tell Me, heard on 400 NPR stations.Dickenson is also an occasional guest on such programs as The Today Show, The Rachel Ray Show, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and CNN’s American Morning. 

Keynote Address:

Ask Amy: An Afternoon with Amy Dickinson
How and why was Amy Dickinson chosen to replace Ann Landers? How does Amy Dickinson know how to answer the hundreds of questions that come in to her “Ask Amy” column? Where does she get her ideas and how does she know what to say to people in distress?

Dickinson relies on techniques learned as a reporter, speaking to experts in various fields. She also relies heavily on her own life and experiences.

From 1999-2002, Dickinson wrote a column for TIME magazine focusing on family life and parenting, often drawing from her experiences as a single parent and member of a large, extended family. For the past ten years, her commentaries and radio stories have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. She also has provided commentary to CBS Sunday Morning.

Dickinson attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In the early days of the Internet, she wrote a weekly column for America Online’s News Channel. She also has worked as a receptionist for The New Yorker, a producer for NBC News, a lounge singer, and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, Allure, O magazine and other publications.

Dickinson hails from the Finger Lakes region of New York and is a distant relative of poet Emily Dickinson. Her large family has lived in and around her hometown (pop. 450) continuously since the Revolutionary War. She often jokes, “Life in my hometown was like growing up in Lake Wobegon, only with worse weather and high unemployment.”

“My extended family is a collection of married and divorced parents, single mothers, step-relatives, adoptees, devoted siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, and grandparents. I grew up hearing stories about my ancestors’ exploits. My great grandfather was warden of Sing Sing Prison and my great uncle ran off to Europe and joined the circus when he was 40.” Dickinson fondly describes her family as “hilarious, short-waisted Methodists.”

Her New York Times bestselling memoir, The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, A Daughter and the People Who Raised Them, was released in February 2009.

Dickinson has been a Sunday school teacher for ten years and is a substitute teacher at a local nursery school. She lives in Chicago with her teenage daughter. You can check out her website here.

The Power of the Purse luncheon and silent purse auction is hosted by the Women’s Leadership Council. Proceeds from the event support the Imagination Library.