Fellowships, Workshops & Trainings
Intensive trainings, community, and resources to guide writers and activists.
Enhance Your Literary Craft and Career
Emerging Voices Workshop LA
The Emerging Voices Workshop in Los Angeles serves early-career writers from communities underrepresented in the publishing world. An outgrowth of the long running Emerging Voices Fellowship, this in-person craft intensive shares the goal of demystifying publishing, cultivating literary community, and diversifying the publishing and entertainment industries.
Emerging Voices Fellowship (Virtual)
The Emerging Voices Fellowship provides a virtual five-month immersive mentorship program for early-career writers from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in the publishing world. The program is committed to cultivating the careers of Black writers, and serves writers who identify as Indigenous, persons of color, LGBTQ+, immigrants, writers with disabilities, and those living outside of urban centers.
You Are a Writer Workshops
Inspired by PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship for early career writers, our annual You Are a Writer sessions provide practical insights into the business of books. Join us for an upcoming session on the ins and outs of launching and sustaining a fulfilling writing life.
DREAMing Out Loud
DREAMing Out Loud is a paid, tuition-free creative writing workshop series for migrant writers in which participants develop original short stories, poetry, and/or personal essays—under the tutelage of writer Álvaro Enrigue—to be performed at public readings.
Poets Across Lines
Poets Across Lines is a cross-regional program presented in Birmingham, Alabama and Tucson, Arizona offering poets in the two regions financial and material support to create original poems around the themes of housing, immigration, and/or LGBTQIA+ experience
Exercise Your Free Speech Muscles
Free Expression Leadership Fellows Program
PEN America offers a 12-week Free Expression Leadership Fellows Program for undergraduate and graduate students passionate about human rights, the written word, and free expression.
Free Expression Advocacy Institutes
The Institute is an intensive, in-person, week-long, educational and training program where high school students can learn the theories, laws, histories, and methodologies behind free expression advocacy.
Trainings for Professionals
Campus for All Trainings
These sessions equip academic leaders, faculty, and staff to respond to a range of scenarios involving academic freedom, hate, and difficult dialogue.
Online Abuse Defense Training Program
PEN America offers a robust training program to equip writers, journalists, and others with strategies and resources to protect themselves and one another. While there are no easy answers, open conversations about the impact of online abuse and how to fight back can empower writers and journalists to remain online and continue exercising their free expression rights.