Brenda Brown Schoonover

Brenda Brown Schoonover, a native of Maryland, retired from the U.S. State Department Foreign Service in 2004 after more than thirty years of U.S. Government service. In addition to her volunteer assignment, she was also on the Peace Corps staff in Washington and in Tanzania. While in Tanzania, she met her late husband of forty years, Foreign Service Officer Richard (Dick) Schoonover. She accompanied Dick on his tours with the United States Information Agency in Nigeria and Tunisia. After Brenda joined the State Department, the couple had tandem assignments in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Belgium. Brenda was also U.S. Ambassador to Togo in West Africa, after which she was assigned to the University of North Carolina as Diplomat-in-Residence. She currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She serves on the advisory boards of the University of North Carolina’s Global Education (ex-officio), the International Affairs Council in the Research Triangle, IntraHealth International, Carolina Friends of the Foreign Service, and the North Carolina Advisory Council to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. She is president of American Diplomacy Publishers, an online journal created in 1996 in Chapel Hill by a group of retired foreign service officers.