Amy Reid is the Interim Program Director for PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Program. She works with other PEN America staff and with colleagues from across the country, including the Champions of Higher Education, the Freedom to Learn Network, and a new group of state-based networks, to push back against government censorship in higher education. She is an ardent advocate for public education and the liberal arts.
Before joining PEN America, Amy was a professor of French language and literature and director of the Gender Studies Program at New College of Florida. In 2023-2024, she served as Chair of the Faculty and as the faculty representative on the NCF Board of Trustees, working to safeguard the principles of academic freedom in the Florida State University System.
She holds a PhD in French from Yale University and is an award-winning translator, specializing in Francophone African fiction. She has collaborated with authors including Véronique Tadjo (Far from My Father (2014), an excerpt of which was published in the 2015 PEN World Voices on-line Anthology), Patrice Nganang (the Cameroon Trilogy, published between 2016 and 2022), Mutt-Lon (The Blunder, 2022) and Blaise Ndala (In the Belly of the Congo (2023)). Her current project is the translation of Marie-Célie Agnant’s novel Rosa the Alligator (forthcoming in 2025), which examines the politics of memory and truth and reconciliation in post-Duvalier Haiti.
Publications
Florida’s Nakedly Ideological Attack on Gen Ed
The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2024
