The fourth annual PR Lab Mentorship Lecture and Aspire Award Presentation took place this Monday, featuring Wattpad’s head of writer and publisher partnerships, Ashleigh Gardner.
Fran Matera, director of the Walter Cronkite School’s Public Relations Lab, kicked off the lecture and award ceremony with an introduction of Scott Pansky, the co-founder of international public relations firm Allison+Partners.
The Aspire Award was established in honor of Panksy’s mother Enid R. Pansky. She was “a mentor to many and was the lone woman for many years in a man’s world,” Matera said.
Gardner and Pansky presented the 2016 Aspire Award to Morgan Rath, a Cronkite senior with a desire to work in New York City’s bustling book publishing industry.
Rath is currently the campaign manager in the PR lab. She is a member of Barrett, the Honors College, and focused her thesis on how to market books to young adults.
This same fondness for literature inspired Pansky to reach out to Gardner for mentorship.
Wattpad, a client of Allison+Partners, is a free storytelling platform for teens and young adults, and their goals seemed to coalesce with Rath’s interests, Pansky said.
“Morgan’s resume really stood out,” he said.
Rath has interned at several companies, including W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., SparkPoint Studio, and Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.
Pansky discussed the importance of having a solid foundation and support system, which he had in both his mother and father, the latter of whom was present at the event.
Gardner and Rath spent the day together, discussing their mutual passion for reading, writing and storytelling. As Gardner’s mentee, Rath inquired about Gardner’s mentors.
A mentor is “a trusted friend, an adviser, a teacher. Someone who will tell you what you need to know but often not what you want to hear,” said Matera, who spoke of the previous award-winning mentors and protégés, and where they are now.
“Like most people, my first mentors were my parents,” Gardner said. She explained how without the mentors she had along the way, she would not have gone from pre-law, to the beauty industry and finally to where she is now.
Aside from her parents, one of her first mentors was a woman who didn’t hire her. Gardner reached out to the woman, sought her advice and networked with her. Six months later, she landed her first publishing job.
She described how to find, contact, meet with, and keep in touch with a mentor, emphasizing how important it was to ask for feedback, ask pertinent questions and to not be afraid to disagree.
“A lot of your mentors will come from unexpected places,” Gardner said.
She once paired up with an Etsy employee to figure out how to keep popular writers and content creators true to their roots, and not lose them to major publishers or retailers. The two were facing similar issues and guided each other to solutions.
“These ladies have done some great things. And the inspiration … part of it’s the mentor, but also it comes from in here,” Pansky said, pointing to his heart.
Contact the reporter at bbozadji@asu.edu.
Editor’s note: Morgan Rath, the 2016 Aspire Award winner, has previously copy edited for Downtown Devil. She did not contribute to the reporting, writing or editing of this article.
