New York (June 30, 2020): Three celebrated authors, Marie Arana, Sherri Burr, and Richard Thompson Ford, have joined the board of the Authors Guild Foundation, the charitable and educational arm of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest professional association of writers.

Arana is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction as well as the literary director of the Library of Congress. The former director of the National Book Festival, she was also editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s Book World. She has written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Spain’s El País, Colombia’s El Tiempo, and Peru’s El Comercio. Her books include the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights; a memoir, American Chica, a finalist for the National Book Award; and a biography of Simón Bolívar, which won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Burr, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Princeton University, and Yale Law School, has authored or co-authored 27 books, including Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619–1865, which was published in 2019 by Carolina Academic Press. Burr retired from her tenure home, the University of New Mexico Law School, in 2017 to become a full-time author. She frequently lectures on topics related to history, copyrights and intellectual property law, and art and international law. Burr also serves as president of New Mexico Press Women and the third vice president of the Aaron Burr Association.

Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He has practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster, served as a commissioner of the San Francisco Housing Authority, and worked as a policy consultant for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the City and County of San Francisco, California, and the County of San Mateo, California. Ford has written several books, including two selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year: The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.

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About the Authors Guild Foundation
The Authors Guild Foundation educates, supports, and protects American writers to ensure that a rich, diverse body of literature can flourish by advocating for authors’ rights, educating authors across the country in the business of writing, and promoting an understanding of the value of writers. The Foundation believes that an abundance of free literary expression is essential to our democracy, and that can only be achieved by protecting authors’ constitutional and moral rights to benefit from their work. It is the sole group of its kind dedicated to empowering all U.S. authors. Established in 1972 to help ensure the long-term viability of the Authors Guild, the Foundation’s founding members included Saul Bellow, John Hersey, Madeleine L’Engle, Sidney Offit, James A. Michener, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Janeway, and Barbara Tuchman.