- Home
- Author Archive
To Encounter Ocean Power
I can’t shake the image of young students—the gears of their minds at work—as they watch and take account, assess what it means to pull books from shelves, set… More
What Captain Underpants Can Tell Us About Net Neutrality
PEN knows how the story about ending the open net goes: they're called banned books. More
In Cold Blood: Practicing Our Humanity on the Page
In a great book, even the most despicable characters have a chance for redemption, perhaps, one might argue, more of a chance than he or she might get in… More
Announcing the 2014 PEN/Bingham Prize Winner!
And the winner is . . . Shawn Vestal for "Godforsaken Idaho." More
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Books with any kind of diversity are disproportionately challenged versus books by and about straight white males. More
Chill Blue Paint Box: Rereading Sons and Lovers
In 1975, Sons and Lovers meant to me the Gethsemane of emotional ambivalence—erotic yet ascetic, the stakes high as scripture, translated into genital dialect. More
What Happens To Your Mother Is Not Your Concern!
The cruelties and abuses taking place today in Syria defy all comprehension. Perhaps not even literature, or the language itself, is sufficient to be able to depict what is… More
Sojourn in the Whale
It was not enthusiasm for the YWCA that brought the aspiring poet from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to New York. As soon as she could politely break free, she headed straight… More
On James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain
Whatever fear strikes any reader of Baldwin’s book awaits right in that opening paragraph: an unseemly portrait of faith. It is not literary sex, or violence, or the conflation… More
PEN DIY: “Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.”
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines D.I.Y., or Do-It-Yourself as “the activity of doing or making something […] without professional training or assistance.” Writers across time have applied this idea to… More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
