Novelist Dinaw Mengestu has been elected president of PEN America, the literary nonprofit announced in a news release.
Mengestu will serve a two-year term as president of the organization, which “works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others.”
Mengestu made his literary debut in 2007 with the novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. He has published three other novels: How To Read the Air, All Our Names, and Someone Like Us. All four books received starred reviews from Kirkus, and All Our Names was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
Mengestu takes over the role from Jennifer Finney Boylan, the author of memoirs including She’s Not There and I’m Looking Through You and novels such as Long Black Veil and Mad Honey, the latter co-written with Jodi Picoult.
Mengestu said in a statement, “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.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
