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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
2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize: An Interview with the Finalists
Dear James Baldwin, How do you think psychotherapy would have changed your writing? More
About as Fast as This Car Will Go
He walked into the living room, looking back at me every so often, lifting objects and replacing them, opening doors, nudging things on the tables, showing me how silently… More
Animal Farm: Banned by the Soviets, Promoted by the CIA
Though the book cannot and should not be divorced from the Russian Revolution, Orwell sees beyond the specifics of that revolution, and even beyond revolution itself, to tell what… More
Ilham Tohti Sentenced to Life in Prison
A writer, scholar, and leader in Uyghur PEN, Ilham Tohti founded Uyghur Online, a forum for dialogue between China’s Muslim Uyghur minority and majority Han populations. He was arrested… More
Send a Message of Solidarity to Ilham Tohti’s Family
Ilham Tohti, the 2014 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award Winner, is serving a sentence of life in prison in China. More
Why We Need Diverse LGBTQI Books
LGBTQI literature, while no longer taboo, still rests on uneasy ground in our school libraries. The tragedy, of course, is that young people are the ones who need these… More
PEN DIY: How To
We enter the world without an instruction manual. Parents and teachers impart what they're able; we intuit life lessons from Balki or Brenda or Kramer; we emulate boy bands;… More
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