Dear Friend,
A plane plucked from the skies to detain a blogger in Belarus. The final print copies of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily rolling off the presses as the independent newspaper is forced to shutter. A flurry of state bills across the U.S. designed to stifle academic freedom and ban so-called “divisive topics.”
As we head into the summer months, the threats to free expression are complex, varied, and intensifying. The freedom to write—and the related freedoms to speak out, to think, to report, and to organize—are all under mounting pressure. Here at PEN America, this means we are in a period of overdrive. Here’s a quick look at where we’ve been this quarter—and where we’re heading.
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THE LONG ARM OF AUTHORITARIANISM
Earlier this spring, Belarus’ strongman president ordered his fighter jets to force a commercial airliner to land in Minsk. The purpose: to detain a passenger, dissident blogger Raman Pratasevich. It was a brazen violation of law and norms—but as I wrote in Foreign Policy, the strategy behind it is becoming alarmingly widespread.
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Indeed, in our globalized world, authoritarian governments are increasingly trying to consolidate control by making it impossible for persecuted critics, writers, and dissidents to find safe refuge abroad. The long arm of state repression is increasingly unconstrained by international borders. And it’s our job at PEN America to call it out when it happens.
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To that end, this spring we brought together top government officials from across the U.S. and Europe, along with the mother of detained blogger Pratasevich, to decry the stranglehold on press freedom in Belarus—and how Russia is enabling the crackdown (read our op-ed at NBCNews.com to learn more). We identified the new ways governments are attempting to dismantle the open internet in our report Splintered Speech: Digital Sovereignty and the Future of the Internet (check out coverage in TIME). Our Artists at Risk Connection program, through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, published Arresting Art: Repression, Censorship, and Artistic Freedom in Asia, drawing on firsthand accounts of the creeping attempts to muzzle free expression across the Asian continent.
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Even within domestic borders, authoritarians are increasingly putting their own citizens in a stranglehold. Our second annual Freedom to Write Index showed an alarming uptick in the number of writers and public intellectuals detained globally (as covered by the Washington Post). In particular, we showed how COVID-19 has become a convenient excuse for the detention of writers worldwide. China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey continued to top our list of the world’s worst jailers of writers, with Belarus and Myanmar steadily climbing the ranks.
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A GROWING VOICE IN WASHINGTON
While authoritarians seem to be gaining ground locally, we’ve found much better traction in Washington under a new administration, and we believe our growing presence and influence in Washington will be core to fighting the free expression battles ahead.
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Today, I’ll be delivering testimony to the U.S. International Trade Commission on China’s impact on censorship here in the United States. My comments will draw from our report Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing, which illustrated how the Chinese government’s domestic censorship is casting a chill across Hollywood, as well as from our earlier reports on China’s crackdown on foreign journalists and censorship of U.S. books in translation. I’ve been asked to testify about how we in the U.S. can insulate ourselves from such pressures, a topic I explored earlier this spring on CNBC, reacting to John Cena’s “forced confession” style apology for merely suggesting Taiwan is independent of China.
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Also in Washington, a bipartisan group of legislators reintroduced the Future of Local News Act, legislation based on a key recommendation in our seminal 2019 report Losing the News, designed to address the deterioration of local news nationwide (read our op-ed on how to fill the void left behind). We called on our PEN America Members and friends to sign a petition urging their representatives in Congress to support the effort.
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We’ve also found new allies in the U.S. State Department. Diplomats there amplified our calls for human rights in Iran in response to a letter we spearheaded urging the Biden-Harris administration to prioritize free expression as they seek to revive the Iran nuclear deal. And numerous diplomats, reporters, scholars, and policymakers joined us for an extraordinary two-part discussion on the fast-declining human rights situation in Iran ahead of that country’s sham elections this month.
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FREE SPEECH BATTLES GO LOCAL
While our voice is growing louder on Capitol Hill, we’re also turning our attention to threats to free expression brewing in state legislatures. We marshalled nearly 100 venerable academic associations and organizations in a communal call for an end to state laws that dictate the terms of education and curricula about racism and American history (covered by The New York Times). And in May, we published Closing Ranks, an update to our legislative research and analysis of anti-protest bills—as the Washington Post reports, we found that state lawmakers introduced some 100 anti-protest bills in the nine months after George Floyd’s murder.
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Meantime, we’re sinking our roots into our local chapters to deepen the literary community across the nation. We convened local news town halls in Atlanta, Minnesota, Arizona, and Pittsburgh. We celebrated World Press Freedom Day in a wide-ranging conversation about regional journalism. We profiled three local LGBTQ+ community journalists in celebration of Pride. We took part in community gatherings in Dallas, Tulsa, Detroit, South Florida, and elsewhere. And we launched a new PEN America chapter, Miami/South Florida, with more on the way—all part of our growing PEN Across America initiative.
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Here in New York City, we continue to lead the NYC Literary Action Coalition, publishing a series of interviews we held with the city’s mayoral candidates (featured in the New York Daily News), and publishing a survey about the pandemic’s impact on writers and the literary community.
If you’re curious who mayoral frontrunner Eric Adams considers his favorite author, check out our interview to find out!
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This May, we brought to light a major book banning effort in Texas, rallying authors like Jodi Picoult and Margaret Atwood to insist on the reinstatement of their books (and got The New York Times to publish this powerful essay from Carmen Maria Machado about why her memoir is so critical for LGBTQ+ youth).
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A NEW APPROACH TO EVENTS
While the world slowly creeps back to normal—and we look forward to in-person events restarting soon—the virtual stage has meant we can readily convene speakers and authors from around the world, regardless of where they live. In May, we celebrated the 2021 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature with a mostly virtual slate of events convening over 75 fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, translators, thinkers, and activists to honor the art of the possible under this year’s theme: Power to the People.
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In an opening night conversation, Maria Hinojosa, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Imbolo Mbue confronted questions of how to reconcile our collective pasts, all from different parts of the country. Our annual Arthur Miller Lecture featured the Australian Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan in conversation with Alexandra Schwartz. Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, joined Maaza Mengiste to discuss language and power in Lahiri’s new novel, Whereabouts.
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Going virtual also meant that our 2021 Literary Awards brought in audiences from across the country and around the world. Hosted by Kara Young and featuring music performances by The Ulysses Owens Jr. Band and Alicia Oletuja, the event conferred over $380,000 to writers and translators in various stages of their careers—we even were able to virtually surprise them with news of their big wins.
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Among the top winners: Ross Gay took the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Be Holding: A Poem; Jonathan C. Slaght, whose work Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl received the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; and Saidiya Hartman received the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for her work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York’s PBS station broadcast the ceremony, which you can watch here.
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UPLIFTING EMERGING VOICES
Last month, we named our 2021 Emerging Voices Fellows. Now in its 25th year, the storied Emerging Voices Fellowship has sparked the careers of dozens of writers from communities underrepresented in publishing. The five-month program wouldn’t be possible without the guidance of established writer/mentors and our extraordinary advisory committee: John Freeman, Krishan Trotman, Charles Yu, Marytza K. Rubio, Camonghne Felix, and Dinaw Mengetsu.
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Further strengthening and diversifying the literary pipeline, we named our Writing for Justice Fellows, a slate of writers both inside and outside America’s prisons who will explore mass incarceration through storytelling, also alongside a star-studded mentor network including Bill Keller, Kiese Laymon, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and many others. And this week, in partnership with Harper’s Bazaar, we brought the voices of incarcerated women through a series of commissioned essays on the theme of freedom, curated by our own Caits Meissner.
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Finally, we continue to support the writing of young DREAMers. Students from our DREAMing Out Loud program presented their work at their annual public reading at the 2021 PEN World Voices Festival, headlined by the Bronx-raised spoken word artist Danyeli Rodriguez Del Orbe—be on the lookout for our third annual DREAMing Out Loud anthology set to publish later this summer.
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As we look ahead to the fall, I hope you’ll consider joining us October 5 for our annual Literary Gala here in New York City IN PERSON! We are thrilled that writer, critic, professor, and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be the recipient of the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, and Robert A. Iger of The Walt Disney Company will be our Corporate Honoree. We’ve just announced that Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka will fly in from Nigeria to present the award to Professor Gates, his first U.S. appearance since the pandemic, and Bob Iger will be introduced by the incomparable Lin-Manuel Miranda.
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Of course, if you can’t make it here, please consider making a gift to support the freedom to write—or take the plunge and become a PEN America Member (both authors and non-authors are welcome to join).
Have a fantastic summer. Hope to see you (live!) this fall.
Suzanne Nossel
PEN America CEO
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