New York City, December 11, 2012—PEN American Center is pleased to announce that its Board of Trustees voted on December 6, 2012, to appoint Jennifer Egan and Erroll McDonald to its ranks. “Jennifer, a prize winning writer and Erroll, an accomplished editor, are well known and admired members of the literary community” said PEN President Peter Godwin. “Their devotion to the calling of literature and their commitment to free expression make them distinguished additions to our Board.”
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 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. 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 non-fiction 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.
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 laude with 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.
Officers of the PEN American Center Board of Trustees include President Peter Godwin, 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, Nathan Englander, Morgan Entrekin, Wendy Gimbel, Jeri Laber, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, Christian Oberbeck, Tess O’Dwyer, Hannah Pakula, Gregory Pardlo, Walter Pozen, Theresa Rebeck, Susanna Reich, Elissa Schappell, Elisabeth Sifton, Clinton Ives Smullyan Jr., Andrew Solomon, Rose Styron, Annette Tapert, Lynne Tillman, Danielle Truscott, Davis Weinstock, and Jacob Weisberg.