New York City, March 28, 2011—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 24, 2011, to appoint Edward Burlingame and Jacob Weisberg as at-large Trustees.

“We are all delighted to be joined on the Board by these two very distinguished people from the world of publishing and I look forward very much personally to working with them myself,” said PEN President Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Burlingame and Weisberg join the roster of PEN Trustees elected at PEN’s annual meeting on March 16, 2011. See the full press release on the election results here.

Edward Burlingame edited and published books for more than 40 years. Among the titles he acquired and edited as a Senior Editor at New American Library were The Graduate by Charles Webb and John Gardner’s first novel, Resurrection. Later, as Editor-in-Chief of the Trade Division and member of the Board of Directors at J.B. Lippincott, he commissioned Piers Paul Read to write Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, the #1 worldwide bestseller, and worked with the writers Edward Abbey, Leon Edel, John D. Macdonald, and Leon Panetta among others.

In 1979, Burligame became Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of of General Books at Harper & Row, where he was the editor for Saul Bellow, Jonathan Raban, Amy Bloom, Roxana Robinson, David Stockman, and other writers. In 1988, he founded his own imprint at Harper & Row, Edward Burlingame Books, which he ran until the end of 1992.

Burlingame has served on the Executive Council of the General Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, and was elected its Vice Chairman in 1984 and Chairman in 1985. He has also previously served as a Treasurer and an at-large Trustee of the PEN American Center; a member of the Eastern Regional Panel of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships; a member of the Book Committee of the Sloan Foundation; and a member of the Visiting Committee of the New School for Social Research in New York.

Burlingame lives in North Salem, New York with his wife Perdita Burlingame, an editor at Little, Brown.

Jacob Weisberg is Chairman of The Slate Group, a unit of The Washington Post Company devoted to developing a family of Internet-based publications that includes Slate, The Root, the video site Slate V, and ForeignPolicy.com, as well as the bi-monthly print journal, Foreign Policy. His regular opinion column is published by Slate.

A native of Chicago, Weisberg attended Yale University and New College, Oxford. He has worked as a writer and editor at The New Republic, covered politics for New York Magazine, and joined Slate in 1996, where he covered the 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns as Chief Political Correspondent.

Weisberg served as Editor of Slate from 2002 until 2008. He has also been a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, and a reporter for Newsweek in London and Washington, as well as an editorial page columnist for the Financial Times.

Since 2010, he has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Media Network, which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. Weisberg is also a former member of the Boards of the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Hudson Highlands Land Trust.

Weisberg is the author of several books, including The Bush Tragedy, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2008. With former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, he co-wrote In an Uncertain World, which was published in 2003. His first book, In Defense of Government, was published in 1996.

Jessica Rotondi, (212) 334-1660, ext. 103, [email protected]