VINCE VAWTER

Vince Vawter, author of the 2014 Newbery Honor Book Paperboy, is a native of Memphis. He worked in newspapers for 40 years, rising from sports writer to newspaper publisher. Vawter retired in 2006 to devote full time to the book he always knew he would write, the story of a boy who battled a debilitating stutter while growing up in a racially segregated Memphis in the 1950s.

In addition to the Newbery Honor, Paperboy is a selection of the Junior Library Guild and was named a Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction for Youth by the American Library Association. Delacorte Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, published the novel in May 2013.

He first worked as a sportswriter for the Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial. For the next 13 years he was at the Memphis Press-Scimitar as a copy editor/news editor and then for 10 years was the managing editor of the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel. In 1996, he was named editor and president of the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press, and in 1998 became publisher and president.

Since the publication of his book last year, Vawter has made presentations or video chatted with more than 50 groups interested in his story. He was the keynote speaker at this year’s 44^th Annual Mid-South Conference on Communicative Disorders in Memphis.

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CELEBRITY FOCUS

John Stossel

John Stossel is one of the most recognized and articulate reporters today. However, he once considered giving up his broadcasting career because of his stuttering.

“Fear of stuttering can easily become worse than the stuttering itself,” observed Stossel. “The idea that I’m on television and making speeches is still a shock to me sometimes.”

Lewis Carroll

The recent Disney version of Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, garnered a great deal of media hype. Even though the mainstream media has not made mention that Carroll was a person who stuttered, his family history gives credence to the discovery of the genetic link to stuttering. Carroll was born to parents who were first cousins; almost all of their eleven children, three girls and seven boys, struggled with stuttering past childhood.

Bill Withers

While Bill Withers has long been on the Stuttering Foundation's list of Famous People Who Stutter, many people probably didn’t realize he stuttered. He passed away on March 30, 2020.

Born in 1938 in Slab Fork, W.V., Withers was the youngest of six children. When his father died when Withers was small, he was raised by his mother and grandmother, both of whom worked as domestics.

Winston Churchill

Seeking to "remove Winston Churchill's stutter by second guessing the diagnosis" indicates neither a truthful retelling of history nor an informed opinion about a complex speech disorder, say experts in the field of speech-language pathology.

Recent news reports that quote Dr. John Mather, a Washington physician, as saying that Churchill's stutter "is a lie" brought adamant critical response from specialists in the field of stuttering and fluency disorders.

James Earl Jones

Actor James Earl Jones, a Broadway, television and movie star, was well-known for his voice as Darth Vader in Star Wars and his book Voices and Silences. Jones spoke some of the most memorable lines in the history of American film, but the man known for his voice was once afflicted with a severe stutter.