Judy Culbreth to Share Her Path From South’s Yearbook to Magazine Leadership at USA by the Bay

FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Writer and editor Judy Culbreth, whose career ran from the University of South Alabama yearbook office to the top of the New York magazine world, will tell her story in Fairhope later this month. The university’s USA by the Bay series will present “How Boldness Begins: A Journey in Editorial Leadership with Judy Culbreth ’72” from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, at 111 St. James St.

The event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow the program. Seating is limited.

A talk about taking bold steps

Culbreth plans to talk about the courage to take bold steps, the power of finding one’s own voice and the unexpected opportunities that can shape a life and a career. The university describes her story as one of initiative, persistence and the willingness to seize an opportunity when it arrives.

That theme runs through her career from its earliest days. Many of the turning points she will discuss came when she said yes to something, or pushed back against something, before she knew exactly where it would lead.

Saving the South Alabama yearbook

One of those moments came while she was still a student. As the incoming editor-in-chief of the South Alabama yearbook, Culbreth learned that the Student Government Association planned to cut the publication’s funding. Instead of accepting the cut, she ran for a seat in the student senate, won and successfully fought to save the yearbook. Her work in the senate earned her Outstanding Senator honors.

Culbreth, a Murphy High School graduate, earned a bachelor’s degree in history from South Alabama in 1972. She had first come to the yearbook, called Retrospect, through a work-study job that helped her pay her way through college.

From a college contest to New York

Two years after the yearbook fight, her campus involvement helped her win a national magazine’s Top Ten College Girls contest. As previously reported, it was Glamour magazine’s contest, and South Alabama’s dean of women encouraged her to enter by writing an essay. The prize included a trip to New York and Great Britain and a group of friendships that have lasted for decades.

Culbreth used the opportunity to launch her career in New York. She started as an editorial assistant at Seventeen, living on a modest salary in a hotel for women while she waited for two fellow contest winners to join her in the city. She went on to work at Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle and Scholastic, and became executive editor of Redbook.

Advocating for working mothers

Over her years in New York, Culbreth worked for several national women’s and family magazines. At one of them, Working Mother, where she spent a decade as editor-in-chief, she became a keynote speaker and served as the Work-Life Contributing Correspondent for a network morning show, NBC’s Today, advocating for millions of American mothers who were balancing careers and families.

“At the time, working mothers had become the majority of mothers in the U.S., and I covered topics about the challenges of balancing a career and raising a family,” Culbreth has said of that period in her career.

She also helped found Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Culbreth served on the steering committee that planned the event, which launched on April 22, 1993, to encourage girls to see themselves in the workplace and picture careers of their own. The idea spread quickly across the country and was later broadened into Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, which is still observed each April.

Culbreth has described the first one as a sea change for young girls. Her own daughter, then 13, appeared with her on a national television segment that day, and she remembered walking to her Park Avenue office that morning past streams of parents holding their daughters’ hands on the way to work.

Coming home to the Gulf Coast

After more than three decades in New York, Culbreth returned home full-time in 2005. She and her husband built a home on Weeks Bay in Baldwin County, and she soon went back to work in regional publishing, serving for more than 20 years as an editor and consultant for a regional magazine.

She has also continued to write books. Her titles include “The Boomer’s Guide to Online Dating: Date with Dignity” and “Bedford Garden Club Originals,” a history of two women who founded the Bedford Garden Club in New York and became early leaders in The Garden Club of America.

About USA by the Bay

USA by the Bay is a University of South Alabama event series that brings speakers and programs to the Eastern Shore. The series gives Baldwin County alumni, friends of the university and other residents a chance to connect with South without making the drive to the main campus in west Mobile.

South Alabama, founded in 1963, has grown into one of the state’s major public universities and a large health care provider through USA Health. Many of its alumni, like Culbreth, live and work along the Eastern Shore, and the series is one way the university keeps those graduates connected.

Culbreth’s talk is especially fitting for the series. Her story begins on the South Alabama campus, travels through some of the best-known names in American magazine publishing and ends a short drive from the Fairhope venue, on the shores of Weeks Bay.

If you go

• What: USA by the Bay: “How Boldness Begins: A Journey in Editorial Leadership with Judy Culbreth ’72”
• When: 4:30-6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29
• Where: 111 St. James St., Fairhope
• Cost: Free and open to the public
• Extras: Reception follows the program
• Note: Seating is limited