Dinaw Mengestu, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College, has been elected president of PEN America, a 103-year-old writers’ organization dedicated to celebrating literature and defending freedom of expression. Mengestu, who is also the founder and director of Bard’s Center for Ethics and Writing, steps into the role at a moment when writers, educators, and journalists face intensifying pressures worldwide.
PEN America’s mission has long rested on the idea that literature is central to any meaningful defense of free expression. In an interview with the New York Times, Mengestu emphasized that connection. “Many groups advocate for free speech,” he said, “but it’s the relationship between free expression and literature and writers that makes PEN America’s work so unique.” He added that “if we lose awareness of how important our culture of literary and artistic production is, our understanding of free expression goes with it.”
Mengestu will serve a two-year term as president and chair of PEN America’s Board of Trustees, following his election by the organization’s membership at its annual general meeting. A PEN America trustee since 2016, he succeeds Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose presidency expanded the organization’s public engagement around LGBTQ+ rights and inclusive storytelling. In his new role, Mengestu has said he intends to prioritize a strong literary presence on the board and to ensure that free-expression advocacy remains closely linked to the lived concerns of writers.
He has also pointed to the importance of PEN’s global reach, signaling an interest in deepening collaboration with the organization’s international chapters. At a time when writers around the world face censorship, harassment, and imprisonment, Mengestu has framed PEN America’s work as necessarily international in scope, grounded in solidarity across borders.
Summer Lopez, PEN America’s interim co-CEO and chief of free expression programs, welcomed Mengestu’s election in a statement. “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,” she said. “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 four novels—The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, All Our Names, and Someone Like Us—all of which were named New York Times Notable Books. Someone Like Us was also selected as one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024. Across his fiction, Mengestu has developed a reputation for intimate, ethically attuned narratives that explore migration, displacement, and belonging.
Born in Ethiopia, Mengestu has published essays and fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone, and his work has been translated into more than 15 languages. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” award. As he assumes the presidency of PEN America, Mengestu brings to the role a career shaped by close attention to language, moral responsibility, and the political stakes of storytelling.
