The Rev. Preston B. Hannibal is Associate for Pastoral Care at Washington National Cathedral. Previously he served as canon for academic ministries in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington from July 2003 through June 2013. In the fall of 2011 he added the office of transition ministries to his work assignment. In the schools position he served as the liaison between the bishop’s office and the 20 schools associated with the diocese. For the past seven years chief among his responsibilities has been the Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys (PreK-fifth grade), the newest school in the diocese. Its mission and ministry is to serve the boys of low-income families who would not ordinarily have a chance to attend a school of its caliber.

In transition ministries, Canon Hannibal worked with the seminarians and ordinands of the diocese as well as with parishes seeking new clergy leadership and clergy in the process of discerning a new call.

Until June 2003, Hannibal was senior chaplain and chair of the Religion Department at St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts. Before his appointment to St. Mark’s in July 1995 he was, for nine years, the associate minister in the Memorial Church and University Chaplain at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1999 to 2012 Hannibal held an appointment as affiliated minister in the Memorial Church, Harvard University. He is a member of the Episcopal Church’s Office of Black Ministries, Clergy Recruitment, Training, and Development Committee, the Governing Board of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, the board of the Council for American Private Education, Washington, DC Chapter, the Mid Atlantic Episcopal Schools Association and the Governing Board of the Church Farm School, Exton, Penn.

Born in New York City, Hannibal grew up in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Westmont College with an A.B. in sociology. He earned his Masters of Divinity degree from Bexley Hall Seminary. He has also done graduate study in theology at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. He has been a visiting scholar at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, England, where he studied the life and ministry of the Rt. Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African bishop in the Anglican Communion.

He and his wife, Sandi, an administrator at Norwood School, have three grown children.