New Year New Books Party 2024

Ring in the new year among fellow PEN America members and supporters at our annual New Year New Books Party in New York City! As we welcome 2024, let us also gather in celebration and defense of the written word. The past year has continued to see alarming drives in legislatures, school districts, and communities nationwide to ban books that bring diversity and representation to our shelves. We invite members and allies to join us in standing against censorship and for the joys that literature brings to our lives.

REGISTER HERE*

We will be celebrating alongside our Literary Host Committee, including Gina Chung, Jennifer Egan, Javier Fuentes, Aya Ghanameh, Kyle Dillon Hertz, Catherine Lacey, Ayana Mathis, and Gary Shteyngart. We will toast to our favorite books from 2023, have poems from Ars Poetica written on the spot for your enjoyment, share exquisite small bites by PS Tailored Events, and engage in lively repartee. All allies of the literary community, including readers, writers, journalists, editors, agents, translators, publishers, and friends are warmly invited.

*This year’s party will be hosted at the Sean Kelly Gallery in NYC. We kindly ask that all attendees be mindful of the art on display during the party.

CELEBRATING PEN AMERICA MEMBERS

This year, members of PEN America have published more than 50 works across genres, written in and translated from a multitude of languages, and gained national recognition. We hope you check out their works in our book list on Bookshop! Click here to view the full list.

We are also compiling a slideshow of all members’ publications—including those not available on Bookshop—that will be playing during the party and is available to view below. Please click the right side of the image to move through the slideshow:

NYNB 2024 Slideshow by Membership

If you are a member and would like your work to be included, please inquire with [email protected].

Literary Host Committee

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel Sea Change, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book, and the short story collection Green Frog (out March 12, 2024 from Vintage in the U.S. and June 6, 2024 from Picador in the U.K.). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in One Story, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, and Gulf Coast, among others.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023.

Javier Fuentes is a Spanish American writer, a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow, who earned an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University where he was a teaching fellow.  His debut novel, Countries of Origin, chronicles a tumultuous, passionate love affair between two young men from vastly different worlds during one, extraordinary summer in Spain, in what is ultimately a meditation on identity, class, belonging and desire. Born in Barcelona, he lives in New York.

Aya Ghanameh is a Palestinian illustrator, writer, and designer from Amman, Jordan currently based in New York City. Her work moves away from state-centric ways of thinking to center the voices of ordinary people in historical and political narratives. Her debut children’s picture book, These Olive Trees (Viking Books, 2023), is inspired by the experiences of her family who cultivated her love of the earth throughout her upbringing in exile.

Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman’s, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School.

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and a short story collection, Certain American States. Her honors include the Brooklyn Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. Based in Mexico, she is a fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library for 2023-24. Her debut work of nonfiction, The Möbius Book, is forthcoming from FSG, as well as a second short story collection, My Stalkers.

Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and most recently, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023) which was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2020-2021 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.