Ms. Somerville was born and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She holds a B.A in English with Honors in Writing and Phi Beta Kappa at the University of North Carolina, an M.A. in English at the University of Colorado, and an M.L.S. at the University of Oklahoma. Her leadership in the international arena has included speaking and consulting with the U.S Information Service and the State Department in South Africa and Brazil. She has also served as President of the American Library Association, the world’s oldest and largest library association. As President she established an Emerging Leaders Institute, represented ALA at IFLA in China, and advocated for libraries and children’s services through national media, including the Today Show. Prior to that post she was President of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the ALA, traveling to the former Soviet Union and participating in a Soviet-American symposium on public library services to children . Ms. Somerville was also Library Director in the Miami-Dade Public Library in Florida, serving one of the nation’s ten largest public library populations.

She was listed in “Who’s Who in America” and “Who’s Who in American Women, 1996-97.”

Her Thomas Merton experience includes Chairing the Archival Committee for the Merton Foundation (now the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living), acting as the Treasurer for the International Thomas Merton Society , current Coordinator of the Louisville ITMS Chapter, and is now working as the Chair for the 2010 Retreat for Daggy and other Merton Scholars. at the Abbey of  Gethsemani in May 2010.

Born April 8, 1914 in Jersey City, the son of Arthur J. and Katharine Lyons Giroux, Robert Giroux attended St. Aloysius School and Regis High School in New York City. At Columbia University he edited The Columbia Review and became friends with Merton, the poet John Berryman and other future literary figures. After graduating from Columbia in 1936, he joined the CBS public relations department for four years, and from 1940 until 1955, with time out for service in the Second World War, he worked for the publishing firm Harcourt, Brace, becoming executive editor in 1948. In 1955 he moved to Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, becoming a partner in 1964 when the publishing firm’s name became Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as it still is today; he became chairman of the company in 1973.

Giroux is considered one of the most distinguished editors and publishers of the twentieth century. He edited works by ten Nobel Prize winners, including Hermann Hesse, T. S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, William Golding and Seamus Heaney, as well as five volumes that won the Pulitzer Prize and ten National Book Award winners. Among his many authors were Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, E. M. Forster, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Eudora Welty.

He was the author of three books: The Education of an Editor, the Bowker lecture of 1981; The Book Known as Q, a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1982); and A Deed of Death, the story of an unsolved Hollywood murder (1990), as well as numerous introductions, articles and reviews.

From 1982 through 2007 Giroux served as a Trustee of the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust, becoming Trustee Emeritus in 2008.  In 1987 he received the Ivan Sandrof Award from the National Book Critics Circle for his “distinguished contribution to the enhancement of American literary and critical standards.” He was also awarded the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University and the Campion Award from America magazine, and received numerous honorary degrees, including a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bellarmine University in 2003.

Resignation of Robert Giroux and Appointment of Peggy L. Fox

Abbot Damien Thompson, from the Abbey of Gethsemani, has announced the following changes in the makeup of the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust.

Robert Giroux has resigned his position as an active member of the three-person Board of Trustees to become a Trustee Emeritus and a Consultant to the Trust.

Peggy L. Fox will assume the role of the third Trustee, joining Thomasine O’Callaghan and Anne McCormick who remain. Ms.Fox is currently President and Publisher of New Directions Publishing Corporation, the legendary avant-garde firm founded by James Laughlin, Thomas Merton’s friend, the publisher of his poetry, and one of the original Trustees of the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust. Ms.Fox, who came to New Directions in 1975, was previously Senior Editor as well as Director of Foreign Rights and Manager of Contracts and Copyrights.She became Vice-President in 1992 and has been handling the day-to-day operations of the press since that time, becoming President and Publisher in 2004.

From a Lutheran family, Ms.Fox was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but grew up near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A National Merit Scholar, she earned a B.A. in English at Ohio’s Wittenberg University and an M.A. in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She was teaching part-time at Brooklyn College while finishing her dissertation when a summer job at New Directions changed her career plans. She now lives in Piermont, NY with her husband Ian MacNiven (Professor Emeritus of Humanities, SUNY/Maritime College) who is writing the authorized biography of James Laughlin.