W&M Famous Alumni
Comedic icon Jon Stewart (’84), actress Glenn Close (’74) and former FBI Director James Comey (’82) might be well-known William & Mary alumni, but they’re hardly the only ones to have earned a prominent place in history. Here are a handful of standouts who have gained eminence in their respective fields, but who also know what it’s like to dodge traffic at College Corner for a quiet stroll on DoG Street.
Author Fiona Davis (’88) worked for a decade in New York City’s theater scene before turning her creative energy to the page. Davis’s newest novel, TheAddress, comes on the heels of her widely-acclaimed debut, The Dollhouse.
John Gilstrap’s (’79) journey to authorship was circuitous, too, meandering through a degree in history from William & Mary, a 15-year stint as a volunteer firefighter and a career in safety engineering, all of which offered ample inspiration for the award-winning Jonathan Graves thriller series.
William Ivey Long (’69, Hon. ’04) was likewise a history major, and the pageantry of the past helped spark an illustrious career in costume design. Long has won six Tony Awards for his work on Broadway and was the National Theater Conference’s 2000 “Person of the Year.”
A William & Mary alumna is at the tip of the spear in the effort to develop a vaccine for HIV/AIDS and other vexing human diseases. Marjorie Robert Guroff (’65) is head of the National Institutes of Health’s Immune Biology of Retroviral Infection Section, and in 2011 was elected a Fellow of the American Association for theAdvancement of Science.
Solving persistent problems of global proportions is the life’s work of George Srour (’05) as well, who in 2005 started Building Tomorrow, a nonprofit that has created classrooms for more than 10,000 children in Uganda. This feat landed Srour on Forbes magazine’s prestigious 30 Under 30 list in the social entrepreneurs category.
William Westbrook’s (’67) new action-packed nautical novel The Bermuda Privateer drops in September. Westbrook was an ad guy who began his career as a copywriter and eventually led Fallon Worldwide from a hot creative shop in the Midwest to a global powerhouse. The Bermuda Privateer is the first in a series set in 18th-century sailing waters of the Caribbean with protagonist Nicholas Fallon.
What will these William & Mary alumni do next? Watch and see!