Featured Honorees
PEN America Literary Awards honorees have produced some of the most exceptional literary works of the past 50 years. Read interviews with or excerpts of work by featured authors and translators below.
The Destiny of Me
"I'm here for you to save my life. Is that too political?" More
Wallace Stevens in the World
At some point in the proceedings one of the more advanced of us got out the volume of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems in its handsome soft blue dust jacket… More
Sick and Tired of Dennis Rodman
I am tired of his body. I am tired of his body parts—those that are pierced, and those (few) that are not (yet) pierced. I am tired of his… More
A Naked Singularity
It means everything because sentencing like Physics and other sciences builds on what came before so that the worse your past was, the worse your present will be, and… More
Two Poems from Metaphysical Dog
In a labyrinth of blankets in the garage // at seven / with a neighbor boy // you learned abasement // learned amazed that what must be / obliterated… More
Three Excerpts from New Impressions of Africa
Tired of giving his sweat to the bourgeoisie to drink / The slut in her attic dreams of living in style; / And to see his hands adorned with… More
The Land at the End of the World
The night—which resembles a notary’s office where resigned third-rank civil servants lie snoring among the sheaves of official papers—transforms the houses and the buildings into sad family vaults inhabited… More
When the King Saved God
Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a room full of educated and literate men, in the age of the wireless telegraph, and not far from the offices of several newspapers,… More
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