The Community of Writers is tremendously proud to welcome the newest members of our Board of Directors. Our board of directors has elected two esteemed individuals, Sameer Panda and Clyde Rodriguez, to join them at the helm of our institution to help guide us into the next fifty years.
Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR Best Books of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His forthcoming novel Our Beautiful Boys will be published in 2025 by Ballantine/Random House in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN. He is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Clyde Rodriguez is a technologist committed to responsible innovation and the founder of Ascend Logic, a technology firm advising C-level executives on AI technology strategy, governance, product development, and leadership. He has advised the UN on the use of technology for global development and contributed to product development across multiple sectors, including AI, cloud, social media, operating systems, finance, and semiconductors, and government. His leadership has contributed to the success of early-stage startups and Fortune 20 companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Bank of America developing services used by billions of customers. He serves on the boards of academic organizations dedicated to helping individuals advance in their personal and professional lives, as well as supporting technology policy efforts in service to society. He is a Trustee for the UC Berkeley Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Boards for Berkeley’s College of Engineering and the Goldman School of Public Policy’s Center for Security in Politics. He served on the Board of MIT’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, the Open Networking Foundation, the Open-Source Security Foundation, New York City FIRST Robotics, and First Place School, an organization dedicated to serving homeless children in Seattle. He became an Aspen Institute Technology Policy Fellow in March 2024 and has advised the White House on open-source software security and the use of AI for public services. Clyde delivered the 2023 UC Berkeley Computer Science Commencement keynote, sharing observations from his career and the ethical implications of AI. He is working on a memoir focused on reinvention as a means of survival, chronicling a journey from extreme poverty to the heights of Silicon Valley, and the personal cost of relentless ambition.
Please join us in welcoming and celebrating these two incredible individuals to our Board of Directors. We are so grateful to have a Board with the vision and stewardship to help us continue to do our important work. A full list of our board is here.