The Nominating Committee is offering candidates for election or reelection to various trustee positions as follows:

OFFICER TRUSTEES

Francine Prose, President
Billy Collins, First Vice President
Jessica Hagedorn, Second Vice President
Laurence J. Kirshbaum, Third Vice President
A.M. Homes, Treasurer
Benjamin Taylor, Secretary

COMMITTEE CHAIR TRUSTEES

Claudia Menza, Prison Writing       
Michael Moore, Translation

TERM TRUSTEES

Jhumpa Lahiri   
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
David Michaelis           
Walter Pozen
Victoria Redel 
Hamilton Robinson Jr
Tracy Smith
Annette Tapert
Lynne Tillman
Doug Wright   


* Please note: you are not voting now. This slate is for your consideration only.


Office Candidates

For President: Francine Prose, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of A Changed Man, Blue Angel, Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, and six other novels; two story collections; and a collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Her other books include Sicilian Odyssey and Gluttony. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and many other publications. She is a contributing editor at Harper's, writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. The winner of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, she was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Arizona, the University of Utah, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. She currently teaches at Bard College and in the New School Writing and Democracy Program. Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, part of HarperCollins Eminent Lives Series, was published in 2006. Her most recent book is Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.

For First Vice President: Billy Collins  is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, a winner of the National Poetry Series; The Art of Drowning; Picnic, Lightning; Sailing Alone Around the Room; Nine Horses; and, most recently, The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. He is the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, published by Random House in 2003, as well as 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly. Collins is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at  Lehman  College of the City University of New York. He was appointed United States Poet Laureate for 2001-2003 and served as New York State Poet Laureate 2004-2006.

For Second Vice President: Jessica Hagedorn was born in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. Her novels include Dream Jungle; The Gangster of Love, which was nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; and Dogeaters, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She is also the author of Danger and Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Her poetry, plays, and prose have been anthologized widely. Hagedorn's work in theater includes Stairway To Heaven and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Theater Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab. Upcoming projects include Most Wanted, a musical play commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse, and a new novel.

For Third Vice President: Laurence J. Kirshbaum has pursued his passion for books and ideas throughout his career. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1966, he worked as a correspondent for Newsweek in Detroit and San Francisco. In 1969, he wrote (with coauthor Roger Rapoport) Is the Library Burning?, a study of student protest published by Random House. He came to New York in 1970 and worked in marketing for Random House. He joined Warner Books as Vice President/Marketing in 1974, when the company had 25 employees. Over the next two decades, Kirshbaum worked in a variety of jobs at Warner, becoming publisher in 1983 and President in 1984. He was appointed Chairman of Time Warner Book Group in 1996, responsible for Warner Books, Little, Brown, and Bulfinch. In 2005, he stepped down from Time Warner after 31 fulfilling years to form LJK Literary Management.

For Treasurer: A.M. Homes is the author of The Mistress's Daughter; This Book Will Save Your Life; Things You Should Know; Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill; Music for Torching; The End of Alice; Appendix A; In a Country of Mothers; The Safety of Objects; and Jack. She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, BOMB, and Blind Spot. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Fellowship to The Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, The Benjamin Franklin Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts and NYFA Fellowships, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. She is active as a member of the Board of Directors of PEN American Center and Yaddo, as well as The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and The Writer’s Room, and is a member of the advisory council for Poets & Writers.

For Secretary: Benjamin Taylor is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and a novel, Tales out of School, winner of the Harold Ribalow Prize. In May of 2008, Steerforth Press will reissue Tales out of School in paperback and bring out The Book of Getting Even, his new novel. In 2009 Penguin will publish The Letters of Saul Bellow, edited by Taylor. Naples Declared, a travel memoir also from Penguin, is scheduled for 2010, in which year Mondadori’s Spanish edition of The Book of Getting Even will also appear. Taylor is a graduate of Haverford College and Columbia University where he earned the doctorate in English and comparative literature. He has contributed to magazines including Bookforum, BOMB, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Georgia Review, Raritan, Threepenny Review, Antaeus, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts, and others. A longtime member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at The New School, he has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, the Bennington Writing Seminars and the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia.
 

Committee Chair Trustee Candidates
 
Prison Writing: Claudia Menza heads the Menza-Barron Literary Agency with partner Manie Barron. Previously, she was president of the Claudia Menza Literary Agency for 22 years, consultant at Riverrun Press, and managing editor and production manager at Grove Press. She is the author of two books of poetry, Cage of Wild Cries and The Lunatics Ball, and has contributed a poem to The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writing by Italian-American Women Writers (edited by Helen Barolini), the winner of an American Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, Plum Creek Review, and other publications. Her play, The Lunatics’ Ball, was produced at LaMama in June 2006. Her poem entitled "You Say You Like the Country" has just been published in I Speak of theCity, edited by Stephen Wolfe, and published by Columbia University Press.

Translation: Michael F. Moore has translated, from the Italian, Three Horses and God’s Mountain by Erri De Luca, The Silence of the Body by Guido Ceronetti, and the poetry of Alfredo Giuliani and Biagio Cepollaro, as well as shorter pieces by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nicola La Gioia and Domenico Starnone. He is currently working on a new translation of the classic nineteenth-century novel The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, for the Modern Library. He has taught Italian language and literature at Bard College, New York University, and Hunter College, and is a frequent speaker at academic conferences on Italian literature and translation theory and practice.


Term Trustee Candidates

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. From 1997–98 she was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is the recipient of The New Yorker Book Award for the Best Debut of 1999, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include The Dark Path to the Riverand No Marble Angels. She has published fiction and essays in nine additional books, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement and Remembering Arthur Miller. A former reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, she has published articles in magazines and newspapers. She is a Vice President of International PEN and the former International Secretary of International PEN and former Chair of International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee and past President of PEN USA. She serves on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, International Center for Journalists, and Poets and Writers.

David Michaelis is the author of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography and the award-winning N.C. Wyeth: A Biography. He is also a contributor to Anne Fadiman's Rereadings, and to Wondrous Strange: The Wyeth Tradition, and to One Nation: Patriots and PiratesPortrayed by N. C. Wyeth and James Wyeth. His other books include a collection of biographical sketches, The Best of Friends; a novel, Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl; and the nonfiction work, with John Aristotle Phillips, Mushroom. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New York Observer. Michaelis’s essay, “ Provincetown,” was published in the American Scholar and included in The Best American Essays 2001. He lives in New York City.

Walter Pozen was a Senior Partner at the law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan in New York and Washington until his retirement; his practice in administrative and regulatory law as well as intellectual property included the representation of Saul Bellow, George Kennan and Svetlana Stalin Alliluyeva, among other authors. During his career he held a number of distinguished posts, including Assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, Counsel to the Democratic National Committee and the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, Lecturer at the Boston College School of Law and Visiting Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy of the University of Chicago. Pozen has served on the Boards of the National Symphony Orchestra, the New York City Ballet, the Ford’s Theater Society, and others. The author of several books on public policy issues and historic preservation, he has also written book reviews and essays for the Washington Post and articles for a number of law journals. In 2006-7, he provided crucial assistance in the inauguration of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award.

Victoria Redel is the author of two books of poetry and three books of fiction. Her latest novel The Border of Truth (Counterpoint 2007) weaves the situation of refugees and a daughter’s awakening to the history and secrets of her father’s survival and loss. Loverboy (2001, Graywolf /2002, Harcourt), was awarded the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. Loverboy was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Her work has been translated into six languages. Redel's most recent collection of poems, Swoon (2003, University of Chicago Press), was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Both her fiction and poetry have been widely anthologized. Redel is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Fine Arts Work Center.

Hamilton Robinson Jr was educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School and, until his retirement some ten years ago, pursued a career in the law (at Sullivan & Cromwell), and thereafter in finance (in due course at a private equity investment firm that bears his name). He serves on several non-profit boards, including those of The Morgan Library, College of the Atlantic, and the Metropolitan Opera Guild. He is married to the writer Roxana Robinson;  they have three children and five grandchildren. He reads a lot.

Annette Tapert is the author or co-author of 11 books, including The Power of Style; The Power of Glamour: The Women Who Defined the Magic of Stardom; Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life and Swifty: My Life and Good Times (co-author with Irving Lazar) and Brothers' War: Civil War Letters to Their Loved Ones from the Blue and Gray (editor). She is also a long-time style, fashion, and beauty writer; her articles appeared in Architectural Digest, Town & Country, Harper's Bazaar and House Beautiful and numerous other journals.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fifth novel, American Genius, a Comedy, was recently published by Soft Skull Press. Her other novels are Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast In Doubt, and No Lease On Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has published three nonfiction books and three story collections, including, most recently, This Is Not It, stories and novellas written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists. Tillman’s fiction has been included in many anthologies, including The New Gothic, New York Writes After 9/11, The Show I’ll Never Forget, The Penguin Book of New York Stories, and Wild History. Her work has appeared in journals, such as Tin House, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Bomb, Aperture, and Conjunctions, and her criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, The Guardian, and The New York Times Arts and Leisure and the Times Book Review. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence at The University at Albany. In 2006 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in the same year, her papers were acquired by New York University’s Fales Library. She is the fiction editor of Fence magazine and is on the boards of Housing Works and The International Advisory Committee for the Wexner Prize.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of The Body's Question, winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Duende, which won the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99, and has been the recipient of awards from the Rona Jaffe and Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundations. Her work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, The Nebraska Review, The Ontario Review, as well as anthologies Poetry Daily, Gathering Ground, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and elsewhere. Since 2005, Smith has been an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Doug Wright is currently represented on Broadway by The Little Mermaid. In 2006, he received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for his book for the Broadway musical Grey Gardens. In 2004, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award, a GLAAD Media Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama League Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award for his play I Am My Own Wife.  Earlier in his career, Mr. Wright won an Obie Award for outstanding achievement in playwriting and the Kesselring Award for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club for his play Quills. He went on to write the screenplay adaptation, making his motion picture debut. The film was named Best Picture by the National Board of Review and nominated for three Academy Awards. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe Award, and received the Paul Selvin Award from the Writer’s Guild of America. His stage work has been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, London, Stockholm, Bucharest, Krakow, Dublin, Budapest, Brasov and Viterbo, among other cities. Titles include: The Stonewater Rapture, Interrogating the Nude, Watbanaland, Buzzsaw Berkeley and Unwrap Your Candy. For career achievement, Mr. Wright was recently cited with an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Tolerance Prize from the KulturForum Europa. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Writer’s Guild of America, East and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Currently, he serves on the board of the New York Theater Workshop. He lives in New York with his partner, singer/songwriter David Clement.