Among this year’s winners were: PEN/Jean Stein Book Award winner Daisy Hernández for The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease; PEN Open Book Award recipient Divya Victor for Curb; Yoon Choi, who won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection for Skinship; and Torrey Peters, who won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel for Detransition, Baby.
Monday 2/28 – Wednesday 3/9 | 1pm ET Digital Event
Organized under the support of the PEN America Translation Committee, these events will bring together a total of nine translators, joined by their authors, working in nine languages from across the world, including Bulgarian, Canadian French, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Latgalian, Romanian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A discussion, time-permitting. Conversations will be moderated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Marguerite Feitlowitz, and Katherine E. Young. Learn more and register here ››
Tuesday 3/15 | 7pm PT
Vroman’s Bookstore
695 W. Colorado St., Pasadena, CA 91101
This in-person event features former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow Reyna Grande in conversation with Héctor Tobar discussing Grande’s new novel A Ballad of Love and Glory. Set against the backdrop of a war between the U.S. and Mexico over the disputed Rio Grande boundary, the book follows the parallel stories of a gifted Mexican healer named Ximena Salomé and John Riley, an Irish immigrant. Learn more and register here ››
Tuesday 3/22 | 7pm PT
Garrison Theater, Scripps College
231 E 10th St, Claremont, CA 91711
Join us for our final PEN Out Loud event of the season! Bestselling author and cofounder of the Ascend Educational Fund Julissa Arce joins us to launch her new book You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation. Reflecting on the words in the book’s title, an accusation she heard growing up, Arce “interweaves her own experiences with cultural commentary” to critique the values of assimilation. Arce will be in conversation with comedian, writer, and producer Aida Rodriguez. Learn more and register here ››
Thursday 3/24 | 1:45pm ET
2022 AWP Conference
Pennsylvania Convention Center
1101 Arch St, Philadelphia, PA 19107
This event is part of the 2022 AWP Conference.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and PEN America president Ayad Akhtar will be in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz. Drawing from their writing careers, which together span genres from playwriting, screenwriting, journalism, criticism, and fiction, the two will explore a wide range of questions focused on storytelling and the process of literary creation, as well as life in the theater seen from both the playwright and critic’s perspective, and the role of the writer. Learn more about this event and other AWP events featuring PEN America staff members here ››
The PEN Ten with Elise Levine: “We will always need new stories period—fresh narratives by which to identify the multiple and unique ways of living in an always-changing world.”
