PEN America works tirelessly to defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture. Here are some of the latest ways PEN America is speaking out.
- PEN America is searching for our next CEO. We seek an extraordinary leader, communicator, manager and visionary. Read more about PEN America’s next chapter as discussed at the Annual General Meeting last month.
- PEN America’s Hadar Harris, the managing director of the Washington, D.C. office, was asked to coordinate a delegation of 40 human rights advocates, including some PEN America staff, to attend President Jimmy Carter’s State Funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., on Jan. 9th 2025. “The fact that the organizers wanted to include the human rights community in this rarified event was another reflection of President Carter walking his values – even now,” said Harris.
- PEN America, in a letter, called on Escambia County, FL School Board to reverse its ban on award-winning author Kyle Lukoff’s book Too Bright to See, a coming of age story that includes an 11-year-old transgender character.
- PEN America called to rescind the policy by the St. Francis Area Schools Board of Education to use the website BookLooks.org, whose main purpose is to flag objectionable content, vet and purchase books, replacing professionals like librarians and educators who are trained in the skill.
- PEN America condemned the extradition of Egyptian-Turkish poet and political activist Abdul Rahman Yusuf Al-Qaradawi by Lebanese authorities to the United Arab Emirates, (UAE) and called for his immediate release.
- In an increasingly hostile digital space, PEN America’s Tat Bellamy-Walker outlined some of the tools available to journalists to shield themselves from online harassment. In a webinar hosted by the National Press Club Journalism Institute, Bellamy-Walker was joined by María Salazar Ferro of The New York Times and Greg Lipper, a D.C.-based litigator specializing in First Amendment and media law.
- PEN America remembered one of the honorees of the 2021 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Awardee, Baktash Abtin, three years after his untimely death in Iran’s Evin Prison where they died due to medical neglect.
- In a new PEN Ten interview, PEN America’s Aleah Gatto, spoke to Fiona Davis about her new book, The Stolen Queen, and discussed her background as a journalist, the repatriation of art works, and treatment of women across civilizations and millennia.
- In a new Facts Forward, PEN America’s Mina Haq interviewed Joan Donovan, an award-winning sociologist and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, about her work studying media manipulation, extremism and disinformation campaigns.