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
Reality Far More Absurd: A Conversation with Zhou Qing
I’m a writer. I can’t build useful machines, nor can I farm crops. Given that I can write, I need to spill ink towards something significant, meaningful. More
Poem for His Ex-Girlfriend
Last I heard you worked at a bakery. / Last I read your poems were lower case / with capital content. I used to like / to read them… More
Fast Talkers
I remember the first time when, sitting on a bus in Münster, Germany as a 19-year-old exchange student, I found myself actually eavesdropping, picking up snatches of other people’s… More
Zhou Qing: Punished to Save Them
If satisfying our basic daily needs for food and drink becomes a highly dangerous activity, what hope is left for our society? More
PEN Remembers Book Editor and PEN Member Jeannette Hopkins
PEN is saddened by the loss of influential book editor, social justice advocate, and PEN member Jeannette Hopkins, who died August 4 in New York from complications of a… More
Zhou Qing: Punished to Save Them
Zhou Qing is a writer and board member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center who has written several groundbreaking books of investigative nonfiction. Imprisoned for almost three years after taking… More
Two Women Journalists Found Strangled in Mexico City
PEN International protests the murder of Contralinea founder Ana María Marcela Yarce Viveros who, along with freelance journalist Rocio González Trápaga, was found dead in Mexico City on September… More
Pasha Malla on The Secret of the Unicornand Red Rackham’s Treasure
That childhood experience of claiming cultural artifacts as my own wasn’t unique to Tintin, of course, but there is something about that crime-solving, fauxhawked man-child, his terrier sidekick, and… More
A World’s Worth of Snow
When there is absolutely nothing left to eat in the house, Hana decides to ask for work at the agricultural cooperative. They give her the job of cleaning the… More
Flee, Sit in Prison, or Shut Up: An Interview with Liao Yiwu
Amid the recent crackdown on dissidents by the Chinese government, the case of Liao Yiwu, the well-known poet and chronicler of contemporary China, is particularly interesting. More
Support for the freedom to read with exclusive designs by Todd Parr, Mike Curato, Art Spiegelman, and more!
