Dinaw Mengestu Named PEN America President

PEN America has named novelist Dinaw Mengestu as its new president. He assumes the presidency and becomes the chair of the PEN America Board of Trustees for a two-year term, following his election by the free speech organization’s membership at its annual general meeting earlier this week. He succeeds author Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Throughout his career, Mengestu has written four novels, including The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, All Our Names, and Someone Like Us. In 2007, he won the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award and received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2012. Mengestu directs both the Center for Ethics and Writing as well as the Written Arts Program at Bard College.

Mengestu’s election comes amid a dramatic rise in book censorship and increased assaults on free speech, cultural and literary institutions, and academia. 

“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,” Mengestu said in a statement. “If we do not make room for the plurality and range of voices embodied in our literature, we endanger not only our culture, but our democracy.”