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Dear Friend,
As we close out this year of loss and strife, I’ve been thinking the past few weeks about something Barack Obama said as part of his acceptance of our PEN America Voice of Influence Award earlier this month.
“We’re going to have to rekindle the excitement of this American experiment, because it is a fascinating drama of whether we can pull this off—whether we can pull off a country made up of people who come from everywhere, and test whether it is possible to get along and self-govern. As I say in my preface to A Promised Land, if we can pull it off, then it gives hope to everybody around the world. Because the world is shrinking, and cultures are colliding. If it turns out that America and our experiment in democracy can function, then it offers the possibility of other communities negotiating their differences in a peaceful, productive way.”
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This year has tested our faith in the American experiment in new ways, forcing us to reckon with persistent racism and justice denied, exposing catastrophic failings in the functioning of our government, and laying bear gaping chasms that divide our population. At PEN America, we take seriously President Obama’s challenge to restore belief in our system as one that can successfully bridge across the vast richness of background and experience that comprises our population.
Whether by inoculating targeted communities against the scourge of disinformation; hosting town hall meetings that deepen the bonds between local news organizations and the communities they cover; mobilizing American writers and advocates to demand the freedom of colleagues jailed around the world; defending press freedom in the halls of Congress; fighting against online harassment; or uplifting new and urgent voices and fostering essential conversations, we at PEN America are determined to do our part in 2021 to build a culture and a country that overcomes its worst instincts in order to realize its promise.
With your support, we are ready to open up the next chapter of this fight, exercising and defending the freedom to write on behalf of those with stories to tell or opinions to express.
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President Obama spoke at what was a highlight for PEN America this year: our reimagined gala celebration on December 8. Instead of gathering in New York and Los Angeles, we came together online for what turned out to be our biggest event in history, with thousands tuning in live from around the world and tens of thousands watching the show afterward.
In addition to honoring Barack Obama, we celebrated the courage of Darnella Frazier, the young woman who filmed the murder of George Floyd; the tenacity of former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch who faced down a White House determined to silence her; the bravery of Xu Zhiyong, an imprisoned Chinese dissident writer who confronted President Xi Jinping about the COVID-19 pandemic; the lyrical power of Patti Smith, who stunned all of us with a soulful performance; and the leadership and generosity of Frank A. Bennack Jr., executive vice chairman of the Hearst Corporation.
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The other major anchor point of the past quarter was our disinformation defense campaign, What to Expect When You’re Electing. We launched a PSA campaign featuring some of our favorite writers urging Americans to spot, check, and stop disinformation in its tracks. We held trainings and seminars for voters and would-be voters across the country helping them identify fact from fiction. We hosted regional town halls in Arizona, Texas, Florida, Michigan, and elsewhere to zoom in on ways disinformation spreads locally. We brought together news editors and journalists—including the head of the Fox News, AP and CNN decision desks—to discuss how they would report out the election results and make projections amid unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots and a White House spin machine in overdrive. Overall, we reached more than 50 million people, our PSA garnered 1.25 million views, and we trained tens of thousands in the best practices to stop the spread of disinformation. Our emphasis on decision desks paid off when the critical calls made by the news organizations on and after election night helped guide a splintered country toward peacefully accepting the election result, notwithstanding baseless efforts to call it into question.
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We know disinformation isn’t going anywhere, so we’ll continue our work defending against it, especially as myths about the COVID-19 vaccine’s safety and efficacy continue to flourish in the dark corners of the internet. We’ve already hosted a politics and public health conversation with editors, journalists, and community leaders to unpack lessons learned from the presidential campaign season and apply them to the vaccine rollout, as well as a public event on how to navigate hard holiday talks on politics and misinformation. If you haven’t watched, there are some excellent tips in there.
We celebrated a victory this week when Congress passed a COVID-19 stimulus deal that includes expanding government loans to local news outlets. This proposal originated in a piece that my colleague Viktorya Vilk and I published in the Washington Post back in March, just as the pandemic first tightened its grip. Since then, we have been working non-stop with Congressional offices to elevate attention to the crisis in local journalism that we documented in our Losing the News report late last year and that COVID-19 has intensified. That agreement comes just weeks after Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced legislation drafted and advocated by PEN America to create a bipartisan commission to address the crisis in the local news industry more comprehensively. He and co-sponsors plan on re-introducing that bill in the new Congress.
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Those strides reflect our deepening relationships in Washington, forged through the leadership of PEN America Washington Office Director Tom Melia. Another example came in November, when Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) gave a keynote address for a G-20 Counter-Summit to elevate the voices of Saudi Arabia's imprisoned and exiled advocates for human rights.
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Sen. Murphy was joined by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL), and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), among others. Members of Congress also lent their voices to support our campaign spotlighting the ongoing human rights crisis in Belarus through a series of videos we highlighted on our social media channels.
We’ve been closely tracking the perilous situation in Belarus following this year’s discredited presidential election. We’ve been supportive of PEN Belarus’s efforts to raise human rights violations to the UN level, including by helping to facilitate this riveting testimony from PEN Belarus president and Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
Elsewhere around the globe, we’ve also watched with concern as Iran has taken dramatic steps against dissenters, executing journalist Ruhollah Zam and re-imprisoning the “Mandela of Iran,” women’s rights advocate Nasrin Sotoudeh. Sotoudeh was our 2011 Freedom to Write honoree, and has shown incredible resilience after enduring a grueling hunger strike and a bout with COVID-19 contracted in prison. On Monday, we hosted a panel discussion introduced by Margaret Atwood and including The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, as well as the filmmakers who’ve made a documentary about her work and life that premiered this month.
We’ve been raising the alarm about another of our Freedom to Write awardees, Loujain al-Hathloul in Saudi Arabia; we learned last week that authorities there are pushing for the maximum sentence in her politically-motivated trial in a kangaroo court.
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We’ve also turned our attention to Cuba, where in recent weeks the government has waged an increasingly brutal crackdown on writers and artists. Our Artists at Risk Connection has been holding closed-door meetings with experts and policymakers to elevate the issue in diplomatic circles, and we’ve been calling for the end to arbitrary arrests and harassment on the island.
Here in the U.S., we just announced “You Are A Writer,” a four-part series of free workshops designed to help writers navigate securing agents, book publishing, personal branding, and more. At a time of hardship in the literary community, we hope the series helps to lower barriers for entry and ensure that progress toward a more diverse literary canon and community is advanced. Uptake has been tremendous, with the result that space is limited but registrations are still open for now.
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Following Banned Books Week, we celebrated a southern California school district’s decision to reverse a ban of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Soon after, PEN America delivered a petition with over 750 signatures to the Burbank Unified School District urging them to reverse the decision to temporarily ban classics including Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, and Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
We’ve continued to expand our Free Speech Advocacy Institute, a virtual program for high school and college students to learn more about why and how to defend free expression. The program has been a hit with parents and students alike, and after two successful cycles, we’re now opening applications to our winter program. If you know a student who’s eager to learn more about press freedom, protest rights, international human rights advocacy, and more, please encourage them to apply by our January 8 deadline.
After a run of successful virtual events this fall, our literary programming for the spring is starting to fill up. Keep watch for an announcement of our stellar PEN Out Loud winter lineup. Meantime, if you’re looking for a good holiday read over the next few weeks, I encourage you to peruse the just-announced PEN America Literary Awards Longlists. More than 80 judges selected the 125 writers and translators chosen for our 11 categories. Finalists are announced in February.
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We continue to strengthen our bonds with literary communities. Here in New York, we are building the New York City Literary Action Coalition, and in October hosted a virtual roundtable bringing together publishing professionals and activists to explore what racial justice in 2020 means for the publishing industry and the intersection between literature and activism.
Our storied Prison and Justice Writing Program is keeping the literary links to incarcerated Americans robust amid the pandemic, which has had a devastating impact in prisons. The new PEN America/L’Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, named for the acclaimed A Wrinkle in Time author and PEN America prison writing mentor Madeleine L’Engle and her mentee Ahmad Rahman, recognized its first recipients. And even with COVID restrictions, for the second year we engaged writers on the inside and outside in National Novel Writing Month, with 10 incarcerated writers in four facilities taking part in the program.
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I know this year’s holiday season looks very different from years past. I hope you find some peace and joy in these next few weeks, and even if you can’t be with loved ones or friends, I hope you can find ways to reconnect and recharge in preparation for 2021. We here at PEN America are ready to hit the ground running in a new year. Thank you for your ongoing support, your partnership, and your commitment to securing the freedom to write.
In gratitude,
Suzanne Nossel
PEN America CEO
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