Though Elizabeth Méndez Berry is currently Vice President and Executive Editor of One World, an imprint of Random House, the ethos at the heart of all her pursuits perhaps lies in her description of her pre-publishing work at Ford Foundation. She describes the role in an interview with Penguin Random House as being concerned with “the connective tissue of voice and art and culture and politics.”

An award-winning editor, journalist and writer whose Vibe Magazine feature, “Love Hurts,” won the ASCAP Deem’s Taylor Award, Méndez Berry emphasizes the ways in which our political climate “takes aim at ideas” and the necessity of storytelling to combat it.

One of the really important building blocks for social power and economic power and political power is storytelling power. It’s not an accident that I took this job [with One World] even though my path here was crooked. I took this job because I believe that writers… and what they produce is at the core of how we transform, how we are understood, and how we understand one another. 

When the poetry workshop questions the place of Yemaya in your poem but not that of baseball in another’s; when your book taps into traditions from outside the purview of white academia and is met with confusion and derision; when you are encouraged to title your book in English or else repel readers intimidated by your language. What do you do? How can we combat dominant ideologies and modes of storytelling enforced by institutions?

For Méndez Berry, criticism is essential for making spaces and creating resources for historically marginalized voices. About cultural discourse at large, she says:

[It] doesn’t always reflect the people who are creating it, for example we wrote about the Whitney Museum’s big biannual a year ago and I believe all of the initial critics were white men who were in their 70’s and so basically, we were making the case that we need to rethink how criticism works and whose voice is defining the conversation.

While many of these conversations around change are largely insular and willfully impotent, Méndez Berry has dedicated her life’s work to actionable criticism and service to the historically marginalized. Prior to her appointment at One World, she was immersed in social justice philanthropy, excelling in roles at Surdna Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. She has also founded several initiatives, including Critical Minded and the Unicorn Fund. 

If we follow MC Hammer’s edict to “measure the measurer,” Méndez Berry stands above the rest.