OFFICER CANDIDATES

For Executive Vice President: John Troubh graduated from Colorado College in 1979 with a BA in political science. He now sits on the Presidents Council of Colorado College. After positions at Drexel Burnham and Refco Inc., in 1996 he formed Troubh Partners, a private investment partnership. Troubh is on the Board and Executive Committee of City Parks Foundation, an organization that provides sports, dance, art, and educational programs throughout parks in New York City. He previously served as a Trustee of the PEN American Center from 2002-2007 and was Vice President in 2007. He has served as Executive Vice-President since 2011, and currently serves on the Development, Gala, and Authors’ Evenings Committees at PEN. 

He lives in New York City with his wife, Louisa, and his two children, Linzee and Peter.

For Vice President: Jeri Laber is a writer, activist and one of the founders of Helsinki Watch, which later became Human Rights Watch. She is the author of several books, including a memoir of her human rights work, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement. She is co-author, with Barnett Rubin, of “A Nation is Dying”: Afghanistan under the Soviets 1979–87. She is also the author of numerous Human Rights Watch reports and has written more than 100 articles on human rights, published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other newspapers and journals. In 2000 she was honored with the Order of Merit by Czech President Vaclav Havel, and in 2003 was named “Alumna of the Year” by the Harriman Institute. 

Laber was Executive Director of Helsinki Watch from 1979 to 1995; from 1995 to 2001 she was Senior Adviser to Human Rights Watch. She was a founder of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, and served as its vice-chair from 1988 to 1995. She was Executive Director of the Fund for Free Expression from 1977 to 1979, and served as staff consultant to the International Freedom to Publish Committee of the Association of American Publishers from 1977 to 2010.  

TERM TRUSTEE CANDIDATES FOR ELECTION TO FIRST THREE-YEAR TERM

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001; Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; and The Keep, which was a national bestseller. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, McSweeney’s and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her nonfiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award. Her most recent article, “The Bipolar Kid,” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize.

Nathan Englander is a novelist, translator, and playwright. He is the author of the internationally best-selling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories. Translated into more than a dozen languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Hunter College and for NYU’s summer Writers in Paris program. In 2012 Englander published his translation New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) and the short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, which won the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He co-translated Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a Knock at the Door, also published in 2012. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in November 2012. 

Erroll McDonald is Vice President, Executive Editor in the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group of Random House, Inc., where he has worked in various editorial capacities for more than three decades. Among the authors he has published are: Jack Henry Abbott, James Baldwin, Count Basie, Romare Bearden, Chico Buarque, Italo Calvino, Stanley Crouch, Friedrich Durenmatt, Marjorie Garber, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael R. Gordon, Alan Hollinghurst, Simon Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Randall Kennedy, Klaus Kinski, Fran Lebowitz, Arthur Levitt, David Malouf, Wangari Maathai, Timothy Mo, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Bao Nihn, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Richard Posner, V.S. Pritchett, Manuel Puig, Salman Rushdie, Luc Sante, Nicolas Sarkozy, Helmut Schmidt, Adhaf Souief, Wole Soyinka, Robert Farris Thompson, and John Edgar Wideman. Of Caribbean heritage, Erroll McDonald was born in Limon, Costa Rica. After attending the Bronx High School of Science—where he received the school’s first Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Scholarship and Citizenship—he was graduated from Yale College summa cum laudewith a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with Honors, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He was for two years a Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature of the Yale Graduate School. He holds an Executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He has been a Lecturer in Yale College and an adjunct professor at Columbia. Erroll McDonald is married to Klara Glowczewska, Editor-in-Chief of Conde Nast Traveler; they have two children, Sofia and Alexander.

Elisabeth Sifton served as Senior Vice President of Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 1993 to 2008, and Publisher and Editor-at-Large of its subsidiary, Hill and Wang. She began her career in publishing at Frederick A. Praeger in 1962, became an editor at The Viking Press in 1968, and was named its Editor-in-Chief in 1980. In 1983, she was named publisher of Elisabeth Sifton Books and Vice-President of Viking Penguin; her imprint won the Carey-Thomas Award for Creative Publishing in 1986. In 1987–92, she was Executive Vice-President of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and then joined Farrar Straus, with which she is still affiliated. A member of the Freedom to Read Committee of the Association of American Publishers and the advisory council to Princeton’s Department of Comparative Literature, Mrs. Sifton has also served on the board of directors of Union Theological Seminary, the French-American Foundation, and the Harvard University Press. Mrs. Sifton is also the author of a book, The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Peace and War (2003), and articles in The Nation and other periodicals. 

Andrew Solomon is a writer and lecturer on politics, culture, and psychology. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and the Advocate, on topics including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and gay marriage. He has authored essays for many anthologies and books of criticism, and his work has been featured on National Public Radio’s “Moth Radio Hour.” Solomon’s first novel, A Stone Boat, was a national bestseller and runner up for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction prize. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in The Times of London’s list of one hundred best books of the decade. His newest book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, was published in November of 2012. Solomon is an activist and philanthropist in LGBT rights, mental health, education, and the arts. He is a Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is founder of the Solomon Research Fellowships in LGBT Studies at Yale University, and a member of the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Trans Youth Family Allies. 

TERM TRUSTEE CANDIDATES FOR ELECTION TO SECOND THREE-YEAR TERM

Wendy Gimbel, a PhD in English Literature, has written about books for more than twenty years.  Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Parnassus, Vogue, and Mirabella, among other publications. Gimbel is the author of two books. Edith Wharton: Orphancy and Survival is a volume in the Praeger series Landmark Dissertations in Women’s Lives. Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba (Alfred Knopf) examines twentieth-century Cuba through the eyes of four generations of women in the same Havana family; it was chosen as one of the New York Times Notable Books of 1998. For many years, Gimbel served on the New York Public Library’s Council of Conservators. Currently, she is on the boards of Parnassus: Poetry in Review and the Cuban Artists Fund. She is a former Treasurer of PEN, and current trustee.Gimbel is married to Douglas Liebhafsky, a New York lawyer. They live in New York City and Martha’s Vineyard.


I. SLATE OF CANDIDATES OFFERED BY NOMINATION COMMITTEE

II. BIOGRAPHIES OF CANDIDATES

III. ROSTER OF CURRENT BOARD

IV. PROCEDURE FOR ELECTION

V. SUBMISSION OF AN ALTERNATE SLATE