Blog
Filter By:
Advocacy • Analysis • Blog • Commentary • Drama • Essay • Event • Feature • Fiction • Graphic Narrative • Interview • Memoir • News • Obituary • Open Letter • Poetry • Press Release • Profile
Browse By Series:
PEN Poetry Series • Prison Writing • The PEN Ten Interviews • Illustrated PEN • Pen Pals • The PEN World
Browse By Email Subscription:
PEN America News • Educational Censorship News • Works of Justice
Open Letter to Thomas Bach, International Olympic Committee President, on Khadija Ismayilova’s Imprisonment
April 15, 2015Thomas BachPresidentInternational Olympic CommitteeDear President Bach,Like you and your colleagues on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), we are looking forward to this June’s first European Games and… More
The Price of Migration Equals Slave Labor
Scoop shit from shitty sidewalk / Times classified ad never spell this / On my tobacco’s Tobago’s tobacco’s sunny soil / Work never been this hard More
An Instructive Tale of a Girl and Her Goddess
Mother-in-Law! Croneold toothless hag, skinhanger—she can have her beloved son back. If I can shock Bhagavati, I can do anything. Anything. More
In the Dark
We have stepped into the picture. / That’s where we are. More
Mother Moon
Mother Moon is bringing in the harvest / you know she grows cocaine? // Mother Moon she’s bad sometimes / she's big, she // turns the tide in every… More
Salt on the Tongue
Perhaps she needed to find the right place to love. After the birches, behind the burning and scattered leaves, laughter was looking at her upside down. Someone said you… More
Two Poems by Vikas K. Menon
But Walt Whitman’s sweetly other tongue // always sang in us, / my Brother, my Stranger— // even as children, when / all we owned // were our silences. More
Writing on Rikers
They write of homes left behind, of husbands and lovers and mothers and fathers they have disappointed or who have disappointed them, about God who gives them strength, and… More
Learning About the Armenian Genocide
Armenians were neither passive nor submissive victims, but the power to decide their fate was largely out of their hands. A “great inequality in agency” existed between Young Turks… More
Makedonija
She sent the twins to milk two sheep, then put a copper of milk before me and one before my brother. Whoever drank his copper first would get to… More