Crosby Kemper III is former director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services; executive director of the Kansas City Public Library; the chair of the Schools, Health, Libraries, and Broadband (SHLB) coalition; and former CEO of UMB Financial Corporation. He co-founded and is the former chairman of the Show-Me Institute. He has taught English at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and been a bookseller in Grand Central Station in New York City. In 2003-04, he chaired the Commission on the Future of Higher Education in Missouri for then-Missouri Gov. Bob Holden. He has served on the board of the boards of the Kansas City Symphony, the Black Archives of Mid-America, Union Station Kansas City, and Laphams Quarterly. He helped Marilyn Strauss found the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival and was its first board chair. He also founded and chaired the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. He has received the Difference Maker Award from the Urban League of Kansas City, the William F. Yates Medallion for Distinguished Service from William Jewell College, and the 2010 Harmony Humanitarian Hoffman Legacy Award. He was inducted into the Mid-America Education Hall of Fame by the Kansas City Kansas Community College Endowment Association and was appointed to the Missouri Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission. He received a bachelors degree in history from Yale University.
