PEN Journeys

Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels, along with stories and essays in collections and anthologies, including Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement and Remembering Arthur Miller. She is senior editor for The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. Former International Secretary of PEN International, she is a Vice President emeritus of PEN International and former Chair of PEN International's Writers in Prison Committee. She is past President of PEN Center USA West and has served on the board and as Vice President of PEN American Center and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She also serves on the boards of the American Writers Museum, Words Without Borders, the International Center for Journalists, and Refugees International and is an emeritus board member of Poets and Writers and Human Rights Watch, where she served as chair of the Asia Advisory Committee and is a former board member of the International Crisis Group, and Save the Children. She is also an emeritus trustee of Brown University and Johns Hopkins University, where she served as chair of the Advisory Board of the Johns Hopkins Press and is on the Advisory Board of The Hopkins Review. A former award-winning reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Leedom-Ackerman has taught writing at New York University, City University of New York, Occidental College and in the Writers' Program at the University of California at Los Angeles extension. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Institute of Letters and is a member of American and English PEN.

International PEN celebrated its Centenary in 2021. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman was active in PEN for decades in various positions and, as a kind of walking archive, she was asked by International PEN to record her memories.