PEN America has elected novelist Dinaw Mengestu as its new president on Wednesday, December 17. He will begin a two-year term, succeeding author and LGBTQ+ activist Jennifer Finney Boylan.
PEN America champions free expression, uniting writers and readers to defend the freedom to write and speak out against censorship, both in the U.S. and globally, by advocating for literary rights, supporting at-risk authors, and fighting book bans, all rooted in the intersection of literature and human rights. Founded in 1922, it’s the largest center within the international PEN network, working to ensure people everywhere can share ideas and stories.
The organisation announced Dinaw Mengestu as its new president on Wednesday.
“Dinaw Mengestu has spent his career illuminating the borders between countries, histories, and identities, and bringing readers into the lives of those too often pushed to the margins,” said Summer Lopez, PEN America’s interim co-CEO and chief of Free Expression programs. “As he steps into the role of PEN America president, his unwavering commitment to free expression, his advocacy for writers under threat around the world, and his profound belief in literature’s power to humanize across deep divides will guide the organization through this pivotal moment for democracy and the written word.”
Mengestu is the author of the novels The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), How to Read the Air (2010), All Our Names (2014), and Someone Like Us (2024). He has won the MacArthur Genius Grant and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. He has reported on conflicts in Darfur, Uganda, and eastern Congo in articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone.
Speaking about his vision for PEN America amid escalating political pressures surrounding free expression, Mengestu said: “My driving ambition at PEN America has been to spread and promote the joy of literature—to make reading and the conversations and ideas that reading inspires accessible to more people with greater recognition of the incredible value that books add to our lives. My hope is to support PEN America in its work celebrating the unique power of literature. To make reading, and the conversations and ideas that reading inspires accessible is an integral part of our defense and advocacy for the free expression rights that make literature not only possible, but necessary.”
Leave a Reply