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 the written, spoken, and visualized word—studying, promoting, crafting, teaching, and analyzing the future thereof—has been her central purpose in every endeavor.

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 public relations firm that specializes in strategic communications support for publishers, authors, and literary nonprofits. It was at GMC that she received an intensive tutorial in the power of media (and learned to write press kit author bios, which explains this self-authored, yet oddly third-person, account.) Nancy Clare moved in-house with Broadway Books, then a new division of Bantam Doubleday Dell, where she orchestrated publicity campaigns for a variety of fiction and non-fiction books, several of which achieved bestseller status. When BDD merged with Random House, she was chosen as the first Publicity Manager for the newly formed Doubleday Religious Publishing Group and had the pleasure of working with authors such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Olympian Mary Lou Retton, Miss America Heather Whitestone McCallum, 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 t-shirt, the back of 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 to Charlotte, North Carolina, and accepted a position as speechwriter and Executive Communications manager 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 was not repeated until after she left the company. (At this point in the story, Nancy Clare asks that you remember there is a 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 economics and financial markets that she had been hoping to avoid since choosing to major in comp lit.

 

In search of a less regulated outlet (or perhaps just driven to distraction), Nancy Clare began teaching Media Law to undergraduates during her lunch hour. And soon thereafter she was back on campus, spending her days as an Instructor in the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte, teaching 21st century writing fundamentals to journalism and organizational communication students and helping the school further its mission of increasing digital and media literacy on campus and in the broader Charlotte community.