Blog

Filter By:

AdvocacyAnalysisBlogCommentaryDramaEssayEventFeatureFictionGraphic NarrativeInterviewMemoirNewsObituaryOpen LetterPoetryPress ReleaseProfile

Browse By Series:

PEN Poetry Series •  Prison WritingThe PEN Ten InterviewsIllustrated PEN • Pen PalsThe PEN World

Browse By Email Subscription:

PEN America NewsEducational Censorship NewsWorks of Justice 

Amos Fuller Doesn’t Speak

Amos Fuller Doesn't SpeakAmos Fuller doesn’t speak.He sometimes sits with us when there is room,His stark dinner tray occupying his privatequarter of the table.His khakis are always neat and… More

Horizon’s Edge

CHARACTERSTHE PRESENT:JOHN: The Dungeon Master, wears prisoner whites.OFFICER: The Prison Guard, wears confederate gray uniform.CHARLIE: Dungeons & Dragons Player, wears prisoner whites.JIM: Dungeons & Dragons Player, wears prisoner whites.DAVID: Dungeons &… More

Sidney Offit on Kurt Vonnegut

When Roger Straus introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut at a PEN seminar circa 1970, the publisher of so many Nobel Laureates it was rumored he had an apartment in… More

Convicts and Communities

The reinvestment of dignity into hopeless convicts—which is after all the definition of rehabilitation—is not much in vogue in America. There is little urgency to rebuild broken individuals and… More

An Indeterminate SHU

An Indeterminate SHUChilled gusts slice through razor wirecreeping around the window's edgelike ants teeming over breadcrumbs.Rats intrepidly stalk the tier sniffingremnants of tonight's repast. I pay them no heed.I… More

Paralegal Training for the Formerly Incarcerated

The Paralegal Training for the Formerly Incarcerated (PTFI) is a job-skills training initiative. The program offers a certified paralegal training to formerly incarcerated individuals and helps with job placement.… More

Turds

Scene 1The setting is a street corner in a residential neighborhood of the mid-1960s. The corner of a lawn enclosed in a picket fence is down right. A street… More

Day One

There I stood in that cavernous hallway, handcuffed to someone I didn’t know and probably never wanted to know. About twenty of us just standing there, scared half to… More

Kitchen Workers

The damp heat grabs me like a childhood monster with clammy paws, pulls me in, smothers my body and makes it hard to breathe. I sweat profusely from the… More

Feeling(s) Cheated

From 1995 to 2005 I was on Paxil, a medication that, ostensibly, was to help me in the areas of depression and obsessive compulsive thinking. As I look back… More