Heather Whitestone - After Miss America

After Miss America

Since her Miss America win, Whitestone has completed her studies at Jacksonville State University, where she was a member of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority and has continued to promote awareness of Deaf issues. She has also spoken out in detail about her close relationship with God, one that she has had ever since she rediscovered church as a teenager. She wrote about her life experiences in her third book, Let God Surprise You: Trust God with Your Dreams.

A volunteer for Republican causes, she spoke at the party's National Conventions of 1996 and 2000, for GOP presidential nominees Bob Dole and George W. Bush.

In 2002, she courted controversy among the Deaf community when she decided to have a cochlear implant operation in order to hear to an extent in her right ear, the hearing of which she had lost at 18 months. The device was activated on September 19, 2002. She said the primary motivation for electing the surgery was an incident when she did not hear her son's cries for help. She said that she has not regretted her decision, thanking her family for supporting her.

Whitestone is a motivational speaker and lives on Saint Simons Island with her husband John McCallum, whom she met when he served as a Congressional aide to Speaker Newt Gingrich. The couple has three children, John, James, and Wilson McCallum.

Some of Whitestone's accomplishments include:

Appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the US Senate to the National Council on Disability - Resigned in 2010.

Becoming a board member for the Helen Keller Foundation for Research and Education, from 1995-2002.

Whitestone was appointed to the Advisory Council for the National Institute of Health on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, in 2002.

She has appeared on CNN, ABC's Good Morning America and The View. She has also been in print articles for USA Today and People Magazine.

In 2003, Whitestone filmed two public service announcements to bring awareness about "Dogs for the Deaf", which is a hearing-dog organization.

She became a spokesperson for the Starkey Hearing Aid Foundation and for Cochlear America's.

Whitestone has written three books: Listening with My Heart, Believing in the Promise, and Let God Surprise You. She has also spearheaded the nation's largest multimedia public service campaign to identify early hearing loss, which was created by the Miss America Organization and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf.