We're honored to announce the 60 judges who will be judging the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards, helping to recognize literary excellence and champion new voices for readers everywhere. Among the esteemed writers who will select winners across ten categories: Whiting Award winner Ling Ma; New York Times bestselling author Chanel Miller; acclaimed author of three award-winning novels Jonathan Safran Foer; New Yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham; beloved Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry; Pulitzer winner Marilynne Robinson; and many more.
Join PEN America’s town hall, “Writers on Self-Censorship," for a deep dive into self-censorship from the perspective of the writer. The discussion will commence with remarks from Ayad Akhtar, PEN America’s president and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of the recent autofiction novel Homeland Elegies. Afterward, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel will moderate a panel discussion featuring author and playwright Wajahat Ali, transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, and author and linguist John McWhorter. Additional participants to be announced.
The PEN Children’s and Young Adult Books Committee (CYAB), a Members’ coalition of award-winning writers and illustrators and dedicated readers who meet monthly, is responding to recent efforts to ban books and intimidate teachers and librarians with a new conversation series called “PEN Pals.” This series of articles gives voice to the challenged creators of books for children and young adults through an exchange of nuanced conversations that illuminate today’s issues. In our first installment, authors Nikki Grimes and Padma Venkatraman discuss the bans issued against Grimes's books, Ordinary Hazards and Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel.Read their conversation here ››
Online abuse shouldn’t be a given. Yet every day, users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter face death and rape threats, racial slurs, sexual harassment, doxing, and countless other kinds of abuse intended to intimidate, discredit, and silence them. It's an issue that impacts countless writers, journalists, creators, activists, and more—particularly women, people of color, religious and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.
Are you an NYC writer invested in community, advocacy, and social justice? Check out PEN America and the Literary Action Coalition's new Writing as Activism Fellowship for NYC-based writer-activists committed to uplifting marginalized voices in our city. Submit your application by December 3.
The PEN Ten with Truong Tran: “I am a gay man, an Asian man, a brown man. I am Vietnamese. I am an American. . . . I have a responsibility to write about these histories as it informs the ways I move through the world. It is a shared responsibility. In this way, writing holds the consciousness of my complicated identity. I have to be present and conscious in my writing because if I am not, I am at risk of being written. I am at risk of being erased.”
The PEN Ten with Lisa Hiton: “If I’m daring in writing, it’s because the writer has control of the whole encounter, whereas saying something daring in real time requires more bravery. Coming out comes to mind. Regardless of how kind many people in my life have been in response, saying I’m gay over and over continues to be harder than writing it.”
The PEN Pod: The Journey to Cloud Cuckoo Land with Anthony Doerr
“A book is like this little universe you get to hold in your hands. I love playing with scale in my work, playing with the scale of human lives and juxtaposing them against the scale of, say, geologic time.”
The PEN Pod: On Book Bans with George Johnson
“This whole witch hunt on books has nothing to do with books. It just has to do with the fact that people do not want to face the truth of the matter, of situations and of people who live outside of this patriarchal, white, cis, heterosexual bubble. But a lot of us exist outside of that, and it is necessary that children and youth know who they exist in this world with.”
The PEN Pod: On Diverse Latinx Voices and Identities with Saraciea J. Fennell
“I was inspired to bring together all of these powerful voices during the 2016 election, when there were several media frenzies and several things in the news about Latinx individuals, and immigrants, and so forth. I thought, ‘Society always gets us wrong,’ and so who better than to sort of subvert some of those myths and stereotypes—and to really write for our community—than to bring together all of these wonderful contributors.”
PEN America is proud to be a Community Partner of the 2021 Latinx KidLit Book Festival, the largest gathering of Latinx children book authors and illustrators for the second year in a row. This virtual festival will take place December 9-10, 2021, focusing on students, educators, and book lovers everywhere. Everyone is welcome!
The event features over 110 award-winning and best-selling children's book authors and illustrators participating in our two-day event of panels, craft workshops, and illustrators draw offs in English and Spanish. Learn more here ››
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