Dear Friend,
Almost daily, another reporter or writer is attacked online—and all too often, those targeted are Black, Latino, women, immigrant, or LGBTQIA+ writers. We know these attacks have a chilling effect on speech, and they take a devastating toll on those who endure them. At PEN America, we’re saying enough is enough. This morning, we published a comprehensive report titled No Excuse for Abuse, outlining how Facebook and Twitter have been all too complacent on this issue—so we’re giving them a list of concrete actionable steps to protect users from harassment without curbing free speech. We’ll be rallying our supporters (and I hope you) to join us in demanding lasting change from the tech companies who control the levers of power.
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FREE EXPRESSION
That report is just one manifestation of our defense of free speech and open expression has evolved to meet the current political moment. You will be seeing more pressure on the tech companies, more engagement with the executive branch, more mobilization of Congress, and more efforts to bridge our political divides. With a new administration in office, we issued a clarion call demanding President Biden make free expression a core priority of the first 100 days—our Members have gotten in on the act, meeting to talk about how to be powerful activists during the next four years. We have an opportunity to remake our public discourse and information ecosystem but need to move with alacrity to combat threats and rebuild a healthy, fact-based national conversation.
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We settled our lawsuit against the Trump administration, setting a new precedent for reporters to take legal action if a president ever again uses the powers of the government to retaliate against them. But the struggle for transparency continues. We signed a letter with over 40 organizations urging President Biden to make transparency and access to information a top priority to restore public confidence in government. Covered by Politico, the letter said, “Transparency is foundational to a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” We are demanding the Biden administration allow reporters full access to border facilities to fully document the crisis confronting migrants on the U.S./Mexico border—and we’re continuing to update our tracker on the effects of COVID-19 on journalism and journalists.
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After pressure from PEN America and a coalition of allies, the Biden administration earlier this spring released the long-confidential report showing that Saudi Arabia’s top leadership ordered the grisly killing of Jamal Khashoggi. On Capitol Hill, we’ve allied with Rep. Adam Schiff, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Brian Schatz, Sen. Chris Coons, Sen. Thom Tillis, Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Susan Collins, and others to advance a human rights and free expression agenda within the Congress.
Together we celebrated the news that our 2019/PEN Barbey Freedom to Write honorees Loujain al-Hathloul and Nouf Abdulaziz were released from prison in Saudi Arabia—but their release is highly contingent and subject to severe constraints on their ability to travel and speak out, meaning that our campaign on their behalf continues. To that end, I testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee about the imperative of accountability for Khashoggi’s murder, and about prospects for improving respect for free expression in Saudi Arabia.
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In response to Chinese officials escalating charges against Xu Zhiyong, essayist and our 2020 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Awardee, as well as his fiancé Li Qiaochu, we continued our call urging the Chinese authorities to release Xu and the Biden administration to prioritize free expression in foreign policy affairs. We’ve submitted communiques to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention asking for a review of Xu’s case, as well as the cases of imprisoned poet Wang Zang and his wife Wang Liqin. We joined 34 different organizations and groups dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights in a joint public statement condemning the mass arrests of pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong.
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In Myanmar, amid an increasingly violent crackdown against protesters, we’re holding strong with our friends and colleagues at PEN Myanmar who’ve been on the front lines. We’ve set up a Free Expression Information Center for Myanmar, designed to help journalists, writers, human rights defenders, and protesters equip themselves with the knowledge and tools to protect their rights and continue their important work. We’re in continuous dialogue with our partners in Belarus, marking the global Day of Solidarity with Belarus by featuring statements we collected from a bipartisan group of Members of Congress, and continuing to advocate for translators, writers, and protesters facing unjust prison sentences.
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Earlier this year, PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection published a new safety guide for artists, a digital roadmap for creative and visual artists around the world who face retaliation for their work. It draws on years of combined experience of PEN America, ARC, and our partner organizations in how artists can protect themselves from censorship, seek legal redress, and when necessary, find safety for themselves and their families. Read all about it in this Financial Times feature—or watch our launch event. ARC’s work is made possible by the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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We continue to expand our Free Speech Advocacy Institute, a program for high school and college students to learn the ins and outs of free speech advocacy in our digitized, diverse society. We’re looking forward to welcoming our fourth cohort this spring, gradually building up a national squad of informed, activated free speech defenders. We’ve been speaking out about a raft of free speech issues on college campuses including group of professors fired for their views at a Texas community college; about the suspension of basketball players opting to kneel during the national anthem; and about the abrupt cancellation of a class on ethics and diversity at a university in Idaho.
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LITERARY PROGRAMS
This January we hosted a workshop series called "You Are a Writer," offering free career and craft workshops that covered the nuts and bolts of the literary submission process to more than 2,200 early-career writers nationwide. We also hosted the winter season of PEN Out Loud with an audience of over 1,600 and programs featuring R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell; then Brandon Hobson with Rebecca Makkai; Kazuo Ishiguro with Jia Tolentino; and we rounded things out with Isabel Allende and Concepción de León.
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Next Thursday, April 8, we’ll celebrate literary excellence with our annual Literary Awards Ceremony. Dubbed by last year’s host Seth Meyers as “the Oscars for books,” we’ll reveal our major book prizes live. We’ll also be celebrating career achievement award winners George C. Wolfe, Anne Carson, Kwame Dawes, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Pierre Joris.
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We take seriously the work of dismantling barriers to access to literary careers and have just launched an expanded version of our Emerging Voices Fellowship. With a special focus on Black writers, the program will mentor and support a cohort of new literary talents, affording them access to PEN America’s skills, resources and networks. We’re also proud to offer a new season of our DREAMing Out Loud workshop series for young DREAMers seeking to explore literary careers.
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The Prison and Justice Writing Program will publish a hard copy of its anthology of award winners in a few weeks—you can buy an advance copy here. That book showcases the incredible poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and non-fiction work of dozens of incarcerated writers in our program. Vanity Fair spotlighted our work and the mentoring relationship Madeleine L’Engle had with Ahmad Rahman in the 1970s as he served time for a crime he didn’t commit—L’Engle and Rahman’s names now grace a new award we give annually to stellar mentor/mentee pairings in our prison writing mentorship program.
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Our chapter cities keep our Membership entertained and informed amid this busy spring. Under the leadership of our Dallas/Fort Worth chapter, we co-sponsored a number of riveting virtual festivities at the Dallas Literary Festival. We held an in-depth discussion on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in January marking 100 years since that grim but often overlooked event. Our North Carolina and Detroit chapter leaders held panels on environmental journalism and incarceration and COVID-19, respectively. Here from our New York headquarters, we’ve allied with the New York Literary Action Coalition to hold roundtables with nearly all of the city’s 2021 mayoral candidates, urging them to make a commitment to supporting the literary arts in the city.
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I hope you share my sense of hopefulness that a return to greater normality and in-person connectedness is now within sight. As our society comes back to life, we are determined to ensure that rather than simply reverting to old patterns, we build a more open, constructive discourse that serves as a catalyst to truth and progress.
Help support our work and make a generous donation today. We really can’t do it without you. And if you’ve given recently, thank you.
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Suzanne Nossel
PEN America CEO
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