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.
In the Presence of Absence
Love, like meaning, is out on the open road, but like poetry, it is difficult. It requires talent, endurance, and skillful formulation, because of its many stations. It is… More
Poems from Light, Grass, and Letter in April
To go into the mountain and it is you / To go farther in and it is not certain / To go still farther in / and there is… More
Life Is Messy, Writing Is Messy: An Interview with Danielle Evans
I sometimes wonder what critics would say if they couldn’t mention race until the second paragraph. It’s a shame, because the book is really about so many other things.… More
Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
I did not even know whether the perfume was my reason for being in there or whether it had become an excuse, the mask behind the mask, because if… More
Leaving the Atocha Station
Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest… More
A Singular Woman
To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas is about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures… More
Richard Blanco: “To fulfill an ideal of home”
And although home may never be more than a myth just out of reach, an invisible city just outside my window, or a place between the lines of my… More
Monster Brought to Its Knees
“The golf fan really has my respect,” Ben said. “They go out there and get sunburned or rained on, they push each other around, they stand until their backs… More
The Book of Daniel
I remember standing on the porch of our house on Weeks Avenue. It was a warm afternoon and I had scraped my knee on the sidewalk. My mother came… More
Bottom of the 33rd
And who is Wade? He is a man who swears that he wanted to be a major league baseball player ever since he was 18 months old; whose father… More
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