Christine French Cully - An Appreciation

Christine French Cully, longtime editor in chief at Highlights for Children, died of esophageal cancer on January 7 at her home in Nashville, Tennessee. She was 67.

In her 30 years at Highlights, Cully shaped the content in more than 800 million copies of Highlights magazine. She mentored a generation of children’s magazine editors. She rearticulated the Highlights mission for modern contexts and turned it outward, advocating for kids to diverse audiences as a speaker, writer and author, podcaster, and expert commentator. In every space she entered, Cully lived out the core belief that underpins the company’s trusted brand: children are the world’s most important people.

She took kids seriously as feeling, thinking human beings—“natural philosophers,” she said, who are eager to find meaning and connect with others. Cully listened to children. She spoke up for them. And she spoke to them, in a singular voice that reflected the person she was—sincere and direct, at times lyrical or funny, and unfailingly kind.

“Chris’s impact on kids and families has been immense, and her legacy will be lasting,” says Highlights CEO Kent Johnson, great-grandson of Highlights founders Garry and Caroline Myers. “Highlights stands ready to serve children for generations to come, in no small part because Chris helped us understand that our nearly 80-year-old mission can’t live in just a small group of humans. It must be embedded in the company’s DNA. It has to show up not just in our products but in everything we do.”

Cully was already an experienced editor of children’s magazines when she came to Highlights in 1994. She was hired as associate editor of Highlights magazine, the periodical first published in 1946 and read by generations of American children. She was joining a family-owned company grounded in very specific ideas about how to engage children in ways that foster growth, empathy, and well-being. “From the very beginning,” Cully recalled in 2014, “I knew in my bones it was a good fit for me. The way I was brought up, the kind of work I wanted to do—it all just fit.”

She advanced quickly in editorial management and corporate leadership. She was named company vice president in 1997. In 2007, Cully became editor in chief of Highlights, succeeding Kent Brown, Jr., a grandson of the founders who had hired and mentored her. In 2018, Cully became the chief purpose officer at Highlights, a role created for her and one that only she could fill—she served as a partner in high-level decision-making, the last eyes on its magazines, and an ambassador for the Highlights mission.

Highlights had been designed just after World War II as a “treasure book” for children ages 2 to 12. By the early 2000s, meeting the needs of such a broad age range in a single magazine was becoming a challenge. Cully spearheaded a bold and, frankly, high-risk project to segment the Highlights readership, redesigning Highlights for kids ages six and up and developing two new magazines—High Five for preschoolers and Hello, a soft, washable monthly magazine for infants and toddlers. Launched in 2007, High Five reached a paid circulation of 800,000 within five years. Hello, first published in 2013, garnered praise as a first-of-its-kind creative success, and its sales far outpaced competitors.

Through it all, Cully remained intimately involved with the flagship Highlights magazine. She addressed children directly in her editor’s messages—some 250 over the course of her career, all written in a warm, close-up tone. Her evident pleasure in the exchange was one way she let kids know how important they are. “We decided to make this space a letter to you,” she announced in her first Highlights editor’s message in 2003. “Already I’m having fun thinking about all the things we might talk about here.” She called this feature the magazine’s “front porch,” a place for conversation. She often shared personal anecdotes that kids might relate to, like the time she got locked out of her house and had to run to the neighbor’s in her pajamas to fetch spare keys.

Highlights has had a long tradition of answering every communication from a child, creating a nearly eighty-year dialogue with children that continues to this day. This unique practice has never been matched by any children’s or media brand, ever. Currently, Highlights receives more than 35,000 letters from kids annually. Cully regarded this outpouring as a sacred trust. For decades, she oversaw the process of reading and responding to kids’ submissions. She happily pored over children’s original stories and drawings, absorbing herself in the joys, hopes, and worries they shared, from desperately wishing for a pet, to feeling confused about a changing friendship, or to worrying about war. In all the kids’ correspondence, Cully perceived these underlying questions: Do I matter? Am I valued? Responding with a thoughtful note was a way for editors to affirmatively answer them and stay close to children’s everyday lives.

In 2021, Cully published a moving testament to this practice, the book Dear Highlights: What Adults Can Learn from 75 Years of Letters and Conversations with Kids. Her essays explore themes that emerge from the book’s collected letters and editors’ responses. Among its appreciative readers and reviewers were many parents who had loved Highlights as children. Specialists also praised the book; for instance, pediatrician and writer Perri Klass said Dear Highlights “honors children’s voices, children’s lives, and the power and potential of reading and writing.” With the book’s publication, Cully also began hosting a Dear Highlights podcast for grown-ups, inviting expert guests to explore childhood issues from sibling rivalry and the importance of play to school refusal and body image.

In the book, the podcast, and beyond, this was Cully’s message to the caring adults in children’s lives: “You think you know what kids are thinking. You don’t always know. Ask kids directly, and then lean in and listen to what they have to say.” Bringing attention to children’s concerns and best interests was the heart of her outward-facing role as the chief purpose officer at Highlights, and her coinage, lean in and listen, became its theme. She worked hard to platform kids’ voices and amplify them to a broad adult audience.

For instance, Cully inaugurated and led Highlights’ annual State of the Kid survey, polling children ages 6 to 12 on aspects of their experience. One year, kids pegged cell phones as the leading distraction for parents; in another poll, children rated “freedom” as the best thing about living in America. Survey results attracted coverage by NBC’s The Today Show (with an on-camera appearance by Cully), USA Today, and National Public Radio, among many other outlets.

Cully was especially proud when, in the summer of 2019, Highlights issued a statement she and Kent Johnson had drafted denouncing the U.S. policy of separating migrant kids from their families at its southern border. “This is a statement about human decency, plain and simple,” the text read. “This is a plea for recognition that these are not simply the children of strangers for whom others are accountable.” Coming as it did from a familiar American children’s brand, the message went viral online and was reported in major media outlets like People, Forbes, and the Washington Post. “I think it really turned the tables on the conversation,” Cully said in a 2024 interview, reflecting on her career. “It put the emphasis back on children and families and took it off politics, at least for a while.”

Those who worked with Cully remember a person who was never much interested in promoting herself, but rather as someone possessing a quiet grace and clarity of purpose that made her a natural leader. For many years, Highlights president Mary-Alice Moore enjoyed a weekly breakfast date with Cully to talk over work matters and touch base as friends. “She was deeply compassionate,” Moore recalls. “She had such a strong and clear and specific moral compass, and I think it allowed her to be unwavering, a beacon for a lot of people.”

Cully remained, all her years, imaginatively rooted in her own childhood. She located the seeds of her vocation in that season of her life. She grew up in Aurora, Illinois, in a family of three girls with loving parents who modeled kindness and filled their home with books and magazines. Cully was an avid young reader and writer. In later years, she often recalled the excitement of skipping to the mailbox to retrieve the latest issue of one of her favorite periodicals. At eight or nine, she noticed the masthead of Calling All Girls. Curating content for a kids’ magazine, she realized, was a job. She instantly hoped it would be her job. Cully felt very fortunate to have realized this early aspiration so fully.

At the center of Chris’s world was her family, especially her children and grandson. She is survived by her son, Matt Clark and his wife Jessie, and her daughter Alison Ferro and her husband Matthew, and their son Luca. Chris relished the privilege of caring for Luca. She immersed herself in his world, engaging in her favorite pastime of leaning in and listening.

Cully never sentimentalized children; she connected with them. She aspired to meet kids wherever they happened to be. As an editor, she drew on her expertise in child development and eye for quality content to assemble magazines that would motivate kids at any ability or reading level to focus and stretch their skills while they experienced “big fun.” She worked to ensure that kids from all types of families and communities felt welcome in the Highlights space. “We make sure that kids feel successful and feel hope,” she explained. “And that in turn makes kids feel that they’re smart. And that’s fun.”