Marilyn Van Derbur


Marilyn Elaine Van Derbur is the Miss Colorado 1957, 1958 Miss America pageant holder, author and motivational speaker. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.
In 2011, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award. She founded the Survivor United Network, and authored Miss America By Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayals and Unconditional Love, which spent 13 weeks on Colorado's top ten non-fiction bestsellers list and was awarded the Writer's Digest Most Inspirational Book award in 2003.

Biography

Van Derbur was born on June 16, 1937 in Denver, Colorado. After being crowned Miss America in 1958, Marilyn returned to the University of Colorado and graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors.
After graduation, she moved to New York City where she was the television spokeswoman for AT&T's The Bell Telephone Hour and hosted 10 episodes of Candid Camera. She was the television hostess for the Miss America Pageant for five years.
When Van Derbur was 53, she revealed that she was an incest survivor/victim of sexual assault by her father from age 5 to 18. Within weeks, over 3,000 men and women came forward in the greater Denver area for help and support. She founded an organization called SUN. She contributed to and raised tens of thousands of dollars. When People magazine put her picture on the cover, there was a national outpouring from survivors who turned to her for help and support.
During the past 20 years, she has spoken in over 500 cities. She wrote a book, Miss America By Day, in which, using her experiences and research, she shares knowledge and insights on incest. It received an international “media award” for the best-written book on dissociation by a professional association that networks internationally with top clinicians, educators and researchers. Miss America By Day won the Writer’s Digest award. Of the 1,900 books entered into the national competition, it won first place in the “most inspirational book” category. It is in its seventh printing and is being used as a textbook in colleges in social work and child development classes.