Writer Phil Klay tapped as president of PEN America, free speech group split over Israel-Hamas war

By AP 18 September 2026, 5:02 pm

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Phil Klay attends the PEN America 2026 Spring Literary Gala at American Museum of Natural History on May 14, 2026, in New York City. (Joy Malone/Getty Images/AFP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Prize-winning author Phil Klay has been named the new president of PEN America, taking on the role as the literary and free expression organization continues to be torn by disagreements stemming from the Israel-Hamas war.

Klay succeeds Dinaw Mengestu, who resigned in July in the wake of a PEN report that drew upon interviews with dozens of Jewish and Israeli writers about the “widening cultural isolation” they had faced since the war began, when Hamas-led terrorists carried out a massacre of southern communities on October 7, 2023.

Mengestu, who had been president for less than a year, posted on Instagram that the report’s emphasis showed a continued trend of bias against Palestinians and undermined his belief that PEN was capable of changing.

“I argued that the organization would defend free expression equitably and equally,” he wrote. “This report makes clear that will not happen.”

Two years ago, so many writers were unhappy with PEN’s response to the war — alleging that the leadership was slow to criticize the deaths of Palestinian writers and journalists — that the organization was called off its annual awards ceremony and “World Voices” festival because of participants dropping out. The CEO at the time, Suzanne Nossel, has since left, replaced by co-CEOs Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf and Summer Lopez.

Klay is an Iraq War veteran whose debut book, the story collection “Redeployment,” won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014. He has expressed support for the PEN study on Israeli and Jewish writers, but has criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The “violence is unchecked, indiscriminate and targets innocent civilians,” he wrote on X in August, quoting a New York Times story. In March 2024, he wrote a piece for The Atlantic headlined “US Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible.”

In a statement released by PEN yesterday, Klay said he held a “broad faith in cultural exchange, in sustained efforts to understand other people, other cultures, and other ideas, including uncomfortable ones, and to the creation of a more open and egalitarian public square.”