Dear Friend,
Summer is here, and with it comes a whole new host of challenges for free expression and human rights. As I write this I am on the train headed to Washington for meetings in advance of President Biden’s trip to the Middle East next week. I will be urging the President to send a clear message that engagement with Saudi Arabia and other nations notorious for jailing and torturing writers must be accompanied with continued palpable pressure for human rights improvements. Here at home as we stand in solidarity with rights defenders leading the fight for reproductive freedom in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I am concerned about a loss of faith in the institutions we depend upon for our rights—courts, legislatures and statehouses. As I said in our statement on the Dobbs decision, “When certain well-established rights are treated as dispensable, all other rights—including freedom of speech—become less secure.”
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Over the last century, PEN America has been at the forefront of the fight to defend free expression. Our Centenary campaign, just launched this summer, will equip us to address emerging and evolving threats to free expression and shape the future by fortifying robust protections for free speech and open discourse. As part of our centenary celebrations, we announced Flashpoints: Free Speech in American History, Culture & Society, a public event series taking place nationwide to illuminate the central place of free speech in historic fights for rights and justice. Next week we will celebrate the opening of PEN America at 100: A Century of Defending the Written Word at the New York Historical Society, opening July 22 and on view through October 9, 2022. This special installation features artifacts of PEN America’s work and esteemed members including Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, and Toni Morrison tracing PEN America’s history through one-of-a-kind archival materials such as letters, photographs, prizes, and posters. Also, please mark your calendar for the afternoon of Monday September 12 for a late afternoon Symposium and VIP reception to mark PEN America’s centenary with some of our most celebrated writers. Details and a formal save-the-date will follow.
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On the red carpet at the 2022 Literary Gala. From left to right: Senator Cory Booker, Jack Petocz, Asia Kate Dillon, Suzanne Nossel, Ayad Akhtar
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I’m thrilled to share that at our gala in May, we raised over $2.7 million from our supporters, including $130,000 from an auction for a special “unburnable” fireproof edition of Margaret Atwood’s classic story The Handmaid’s Tale auctioned by Sotheby’s. Our guests gathered under the Museum of Natural History’s blue whale to raise a glass to freedom of expression and our honorees of the evening, including imprisoned Ukrainian journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko, who was recognized with the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. We were thrilled to welcome Zadie Smith, Audible CEO Don Katz, high school activist Jack Petocz, Michael Douglas, Asia Kate Dillon, and Ruth Negga as our honorees and presenters.
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Our Opening Night World Voices Festival event, featuring Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah and Nadifa Mohamed
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In May, we also held the 2022 PEN World Voices Festival, which featured more than 100 writers from 25 countries in 35 cross-cultural exchanges and events. Notable festival speakers participants from this year’s lineup included Abdulrazak Gurnah, Alejandro Zambra, David Grossman, Eileen Myles, Jennifer Egan, Gary Shteyngart, Mario Bellatin, Natalie Diaz, Warsan Shire, and many more.
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With mounting crises including a raging war in Ukraine. we convened as part of the Festival an Emergency Congress of Writers at the United Nations that engaged 61 writers from over 30 countries to consider their role amid global political and social unrest. We also organized a delegation of Ukrainian writers and human rights advocates for a high-level visit to Washington, D.C. to discuss Russia’s campaign for the cultural erasure of Ukraine with leading policymakers at the State Department, White House, Capitol Hill and think tanks.
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Turning our attention overseas, we released the third edition of our annual Freedom to Write Index, finding that at least 277 writers and public intellectuals in 36 countries worldwide were jailed during 2021 for their writing and related free expression. The report’s main findings showed that Myanmar newly jailed the most writers in 2021 and jumped to third-place in the global rankings, succeeding China and Saudi Arabia as the top jailers of writers in total.
We recently hosted Human Rights in Crisis, Belarus 2022, an event at the UN Human Rights Council’s 50th session on how to support freedom of expression and cultural rights in Belarus. Moderated by Polina Sadovskaya, our program director for Eurasia, the event featured Margaret Atwood and the UN Special Rapporteur on Belarus Anais Marin. PEN America also met with the President of the Republic of Armenia Vahagn Khachaturyan, alongside representatives from PEN Georgia and PEN Armenia, to discuss the importance of further developing Armenian-Georgian cultural ties through dialogue.
As we careen towards what looks to be another contentious U.S. midterm election season, we are hard at work fighting back against the threats that disinformation poses to our information ecosystem. In April, we published Hard News, a new survey of more than 1,000 reporters and editors nationwide on how disinformation is disrupting the practice of journalism. A staggering 90% of journalists said disinformation impacted their work; with the overall results pinpointing a lack of newsroom tools and procedures, community trust in jeopardy, and diminished professional security of journalists as key ways disinformation is significantly changing journalism.
Supporting the crucial role of the press, we celebrated World Press Freedom Day 2022 with a slate of international events and calls-to-action, among them two panel events on disinformation and assaults on student press freedom and a workshop on artistic freedom at UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day conference in Uruguay.
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Erika George, co-leader of PEN America Utah, with Ayad Akhtar
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Our Membership and National Engagement team has been actively involved in several convenings and events across our different chapter cities. Following the launch of our Utah chapter in March, we held events in Austin and Tulsa, discussing race, literature, freedom of speech, and contested histories and featuring writers like Nikole Hannah-Jones, ZZ Packer, and Danez Smith.
Our third cohort of Writing For Justice Fellows have wrapped their projects, and will begin the journey of placing their created works examining the complexities of mass incarceration through the writer's lens. Our anthology The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison has distributed approximately 25,000 books to aspiring writers in prison to date, and seen significant press in publications such as The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, among many others.
As always, your ongoing enthusiasm and support for PEN America’s work makes all of this possible. Thank you.
Suzanne Nossel
PEN America CEO
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