PEN America is proud to be a part of the 2025 Printers Row Lit Fest, which will take place September 6 & 7 on South Dearborn Street in the South Loop, Chicago. Tasslyn Magnusson, Senior Advisor with the Freedom to Read program at PEN America, will be speaking at The Fight Against Banned Books panel, along with Samira Ahmed (author of The Singular Life of Aria Patel), Danielle Moore (Founder of Semicolon Books), and Donna Seaman (EIC of Booklist). The panel will be moderated by journalist Natalie Y. Moore.
This free panel will take place at the Joseph & Bessie Feinberg Foundation Stage (W. Polk St., just east of Clark St.)
Learn more about the 2025 Printers Row Lit Fest >>
Speakers
Samira Ahmed is the New York Times bestselling author of Love, Hate, and Other Filters, Internment, This Book Won’t Burn, and The Singular Life of Aria Patel. She was born in Bombay, India, and has lived in New York, Chicago, and Kauai, where she spent a year searching for the perfect mango. She invites you to visit her online at samiraahmed.com and on Twitter and Instagram @sam_aye_ahm.
Tasslyn Magnusson is a senior advisor with the Freedom to Read program at PEN America. She researches censorship attempts in the K-12 libraries and supports PEN America’s work in creating resources to support authors whose work is targeted.
Danielle Moore is a Chicago-based bookseller, curator, and creative entrepreneur turning pages into power. She’s the founder of Semicolon Bookstore and a champion of Black stories, beautiful spaces, and bold ideas—from book cafés to whiskey brands. Wherever art and impact meet, Danielle is probably building something brilliant (and bookish) there.
Donna Seaman is Editor in Chief for Booklist. A recipient of the Louis Shores Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, Seaman is a member of the Content Leadership Team for the American Writers Museum and an adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s MA in Writing and MFA in Prose and Poetry programs. Seaman’s author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists and River of Books: A Life in Reading.
Natalie Y. Moore is a journalist, author, playwright and senior lecturer at Northwestern University. Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. She is available for speeches or keynotes on these issues. Natalie’s acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation received the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and was Buzzfeed’s best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.