Mariah has been speaking professionally since 1987. She is a member of the National Speakers Association and President-Elect of the National Capital Speakers Association. Mariah also works with corporations to produce Listening to Women, a conference for companies that care about retaining, recruiting, promoting, and understanding their female employees.

Mariah is a former columnist for Oxygen Media on their sports website. She is a former columnist for the Washington Post and wrote the first nationally syndicated women's sports column for Knight-Ridder/Tribune. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Working Woman, Ms., Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Shape, Self, USA Today and hundreds of other publications.

Mariah is the co-founder and co-owner of a consulting business called Speaking Success For Athletes which offers individualized coaching for athletes who want to achieve as much success on the podium as they have on the playing fields. A former professional athlete, Mariah played basketball at Stanford (‘78), where she was the leading scorer all four years, averaging 19 points per game; one rebounding record (most in a single game: 20) remains unbroken. She also played professionally in France and in the first womens pro league in the United States (WBL).

Mariah founded the Frances Willard Society, an online community designed to foster teamwork and professional development among people who write about women's sports, in December 1998. The list now has more than 130 writers.

Mariah has won numerous awards for her writing and speaking, including the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s Book Award, the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Magazine Journalism Award, the National Association of Girls and Women in Sport’s Guiding Woman in Sport Award, and the Run, Jane, Run Nancy Rehm Memorial Award. In 1996, she was inducted into the National Women in Sports Hall of Fame. Mariah's latest book, The Unburdened Heart, was nominated for the Christopher Award, given to artists whose work "lights a candle rather than cursing the darkness."

Presentation Topics...

Articles by Mariah Burton Nelson:

• Are You an Athlete?
  
• Bad Sports: Football, O.J. Simpson, and Wife-Beating
  
• Go, Mom!
  
• I Won. I`m Sorry
  
• Learning What Team Really Means
  
• 5 Essential Lessons from the Playing Fields