Zumwald wins Public Policy category in 2025 Cicero Speechwriting Awards competition
ENGLEWOOD, Ohio, April 21, 2025 – Teresa Zumwald, the CEO, speechwriter, executive speech coach and storyteller at Zumwald & Company, won the Public Policy category in the 2025 Cicero Speechwriting Awards from Vital Speeches of the Day.
This makes Zumwald a 21-time winner of the Cicero Speechwriting Awards since 2014.
The Cicero Speechwriting Awards competition, now in its 18th year, recognizes the speechwriters and the speakers who make rhetoric great.
The title of speech that won the Public Policy category is “Let’s Shine a New Light on Adoption – and Make Adoption Easier for Birth Mothers – So More Women Choose It.”
The speech was written for Terri Marcroft, executive director and founder, Unplanned Good Inc., and delivered at the Live Action Lawmakers Summit in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2024.
The winning speech is featured on page 44 of “These Vital Speeches: The Best of the 2025 Cicero Speechwriting Awards,” a commemorative anthology of the winning speeches now posted on the Cicero Speechwriting Awards website.
Zumwald and the other 2025 winners of the Cicero Speechwriting Awards will be recognized at the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association Oct. 28–30 in Washington, D.C.
These winners help “set the standard for modern speechwriting,” said Cicero Speechwriting Awards Program Chairman David Murray.
In a LinkedIn post announcing the winners, Murray also said that Cicero winners and honorable mention recipients “help to define excellence in professional speechwriting, at a moment when rhetorical greatness is needed as badly as it ever has been, before.”
ABOUT THE AWARDS
Presented by Vital Speeches of the Day, the monthly magazine that’s collected the best speeches in the world for nine decades, the Cicero Speechwriting Awards recognize the work that makes the speeches that help leaders lead – in every sector of society.
The Cicero Speechwriting Awards website notes that “since Cicero called rhetoric a ‘great art’ more than 2,000 years ago, the world has seen the Gutenberg Press, radio, television, the internet and social media.
“These technological advances haven’t diminished the transformative social power of a great speech. If anything, they’ve underlined it.”
These awards recognize speechwriters and speakers for doing “exceptional research, audience analysis, introspection, writing and thoughtful rewriting,” according to the website.
