What you missed, if you missed the 2025 PSA World Conference

If you’d have made it to the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Conference in person last week, you would have …

… been disabused on the very first day of your suspicion that you’ve seen and heard it all when it comes to leadership communication and speechwriting.

Preconference seminar leader Katie Garcia learned how communicators can command credibility when she started out as a communication consultant … at 15. Now, she’s teaching.

Brian Miller learned how to engage audiences in an earlier career, as a professional magician. As a messaging consultant for experts …

… he is doing the teaching now, too.

At the official conference-opening keynote panel (left to right), longtime Walmart speechwriter Jerry Wohletz, Williams College exec comms chief Jim Reische, European Stability Mechanism speechwriter Juliana Dahl and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker speechwriter Anne Caprara expressed intensely different points of view on the proper role of rhetoric in our modern moment—in a conversation that was collegial nevertheless. Moderator Dan Gerstein (at right)—former speechwriter to Senator Joe Lieberman—must get some of the credit for that.

Football superstar Peyton Manning has had the same speechwriter since he was a college boy—PSA stalwart Kathleen Hessert—and he recorded some thoughts on the power of longevity in a speechwriter/speaker relationship. “Kathleen has a system that aligns the themes that I care about with a range of insider stories that can relate to the client,” Manning said. “And then I can audible, if you will, just like during a football game, and opt for the ones that best fit that particular situation.”

In the traditional “Speechwriter Crowdsource” lunch session, speechwriters like Baylor University’s Daniel Notman …

… the European Parliament’s Isabelle Gaudeul-Ehrhart …

… and MIT’s Martha Eddison …

… shared hard-earned hacks to make the strange work of speechwriting a little less difficult and dangerous, at least.

NATO speechwriter Claire Craanen gave a speech about a speech. More specifically, she gave an acceptance speech for the 2025 Cicero Speechwriting Award-winning speech she wrote for NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte: “To Prevent War, Spend More.”

Harvard Kennedy School leadership communication lecturer Allison Shapira parried speechwriters’ spiritual reluctance to embrace her provocative topic: How to use AI to create more authentic leadership communication …

… and we all drank about it afterward, on the fourth-floor roof of Washington’s newest museums, a linguistic celebration, called Planet Word.

And on the last morning the subject was resilience—a series of talks convened by Justine Adelizzi, long known as a great speechwriter and more recently recognized as a master convener.

Former Microsoft exec comms pro and novelist Justina Chen challenged speechwriters to use their skills to become rhetoric-wielding guerrilla political activists, writing constructive letters to the powerful and offering public suggestions for better rhetoric, perhaps using the hashtag (named after the PSA’s parent organization, Pro Rhetoric, LLC) #prorhetoricprobono.

Terry Edmonds followed Chen by offering his take on resilience, now three wild decades removed from his pioneering stint as the first Black Chief White House Speechwriter, for President Clinton. Repeatedly, he sang, “Deep in my heart, I do believe” … and completing the lyric sternly, “we shall not be overcome” by the political forces of the moment.

Kristina Drye was marched out of her office at USAID by DOGE last February, and survived to tell the tale—and to testify to her continuing work (now as speechwriter to Senator Martin Henrich (D-N.M.)

And you can’t even believe what personal injuries and professional insults University of Michigan speechwriter Charles Rousseaux has endured this year. But after his talk, all his co-panelists expressed their solidarity, to a teary speechwriters’ standing ovation.

What kind of professional conference was this, anyway?

The kind that concludes with a meditation by prominent podcaster Phoebe Judge (“Criminal,” and “This Is Love”) on how to use oral communication to connect human beings (still). Standing comfortably on the shoulders of her childhood family friend Studs Terkel, Judge said she thought it helps her to relate to other people when she realizes that she has been both very lucky and very unlucky in life. I’m still chewing on that one, but it does sound right to me. And I concluded the conference by quoting Terkel contemporary Kurt Vonnegut, who said the meaning of life is: “We are here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

All photographs credited to speechwriter Lauren Mueller, who recently chucked her big Washington job and moved to Portland, Oregon, to start fresh. If you have an assignment that might require that kind of bold communicator—here’s Lauren.