Rose Stuckey to be Corinne Sternhelmer Greenfield Lecture speaker

A journalism program alumna who has enjoyed success in the corporate world, Rose Stuckey Kirk of Austin, Texas, will present the fall 2025 Corinne Sternheimer Greenfield Lecture at Arkansas State University.

Titled “From Innocence to Innovation: A Lattice (not Ladder) Climb to the Top of Corporate America,” her presentation will be held Sept. 17, in Riceland Hall of Fowler Center.The public is welcome, and admission is free.

First presented in 2004, the annual Greenfield Lecture is funded by an endowment established by Drs. Rosalee and Raymond Weiss to honor her mother, Corinne Sternheimer Greenfield, who was born in Jonesboro in 1896.

The Sternheimer family was among the first to support the state agricultural school, established by legislative act in 1909, that has evolved into Arkansas State University. The Greenfield Lecture is also supported by the College of Liberal Arts and Communication, which coordinates the event.

A member of the Board of Directors of Casella Waste Systems, Kirk serves on the Compensation and Human Capital Committee and the Nominating and ESG Committee.

She is an executive with more than 35 years of experience leading sales, marketing, customer service, go-to-market strategies, and responsible innovation functions. During a career that began as an award-winning journalist and concluded as an executive at Verizon, Kirk served in a number of senior executive roles including vice president of enterprise and government sales with accountability for generating $500 million in revenue.

She also oversaw customer service, employee communications, and a number of marketing functions. Prior to her senior leader roles in profit-and-loss functions, Kirk served as a senior director with the former GTE telecommunications company’s CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) and previously worked in marketing for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, now AT&T.

In her final role with Verizon, where she served as its chief corporate social responsibility officer, Kirk used her extensive portfolio of experiences to transition Verizon from philanthropy to responsible innovation. She delivered revenue-generating solutions by using societal insights to identify unmet customer needs and to create new business products. She developed new professional services solutions for the education and the small business sectors.