New York City, March 13, 2012—The Board of PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, voted at their meeting on March 8, 2012, to appoint Elisabeth Sifton as at-large Trustee.
“We are so pleased to welcome Elisabeth Sifton, with her great depth of editorial and publishing experience, onto the Board. I look forward to working with her in the future,” said PEN President Peter Godwin.
Elisabeth Sifton served as Senior Vice President of Farrar Straus and Giroux from 1993 to 2008, and also Publisher, then Editor-at-Large, of its subsidiary Hill and Wang. She began her career in book 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., 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, of the French-American Foundation, and of the Harvard University Press, as well as on the board of advisers to the Beacon Press, and the visiting committees to Harvard’s Department of English and American History and to its University Press.
Mrs. Sifton is also the author of a book, The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Peace and War (2003), and of articles in The Nation and other periodicals.
Officers of the PEN American Center Board of Trustees include Executive Vice President John Troubh, Vice Presidents Ron Chernow and Victoria Redel, Treasurer John Oakes, and Secretary Elinor Lipman Trustees include Cara Benson, Susan Bernofsky, Edward Burlingame, Anne Burt, Morgan Entrekin, Wendy Gimbel, Jeri Laber, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, Gregory Pardlo, Christian Oberbeck, Tess O’Dwyer, Hannah Pakula, Walter Pozen, Theresa Rebeck, Susanna Reich, Hamilton Robinson, Jr., Elissa Schappell, Clinton Ives Smullyan Jr., Rose Styron, Annette Tapert, Lynne Tillman, Danielle Truscott, Davis Weinstock, and Jacob Weisberg.