Dinaw Mengestu on Leading PEN America Amidst Free Speech Challenges

The Role of PEN America's President

• 🎯 The primary role of the PEN America president is to be the outward-facing advocate for the organization, promoting its mission.
• ✍️ The president must be a writer, reflecting the integrated relationship between free expression work and the literary community.
• 🗣️ A key responsibility is to echo sentiments from the literary community and serve as their voice within the organization.

PEN America's Multifaceted Work

• 📚 PEN America advocates for and defends writers, but also documents subtle ways free expression is threatened by governments and non-state actors.
• 📰 The organization highlights the loss of free expression when local news disappears, impacting accountability.
• 🌍 PEN America supports writers at risk globally and addresses campus free speech issues, fostering engaged dialogue.

Navigating Recent Challenges and Criticism

• ⚖️ The organization faced criticism, including the cancellation of its World Voices Festival, due to its response to the war in Gaza.
• 💬 Mengetsu emphasizes that criticism is fundamental to a free society and essential for holding PEN America accountable to high ethical standards.
• 🤝 Challenges and critiques are seen as expressions of concern and a desire for the organization to do better and treat everyone equally.

Urgent Issues and Free Expression

• 🚫 The most urgent issue is government censorship in recent history, altering communication and silencing voices.
• ⚠️ Specific concerns include book bans, the relationship between government and corporations, and the silencing of immigrants' free expression rights.
• ✊ Mengetsu stresses that power resides within communities and that fierce fighting back is necessary to ensure people feel they can speak again.

Writer's Perspective on Activism and Service

• 💡 Mengetsu sees himself as a writer deeply engaged with the world, trying to understand its complexity from all sides.
• 🌍 This writer's perspective aligns with PEN America's core value of free expression, which must be shared and universally transmuted.
• 🤝 Leading PEN America is a way to pay back a debt to literature and the literary community that has profoundly shaped his life.

Global Responsibilities and Future Writing

• 🌐 PEN America collaborates with PEN International and other global chapters to support writers outside the US.
• 🏛️ Mengetsu will continue his role as a professor at Bard, working on a platform to protect independent news under totalitarian regimes.
• ✍️ He aims to continue writing novels, inspired by the dialogue and creativity within the literary community.