This recording comes from the PEN America Archives. Consisting of over 1500 hours of audio and video material, the PEN America Archives showcase the intersection of literature and free expression through the voices of some of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, and activists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and in collaboration with Princeton University, the archives not only illustrate the institutional trajectory of PEN America, but also highlight the voices and words of poets, essayists, novelists, and others who resist the infringement of free expression. The entirety of the PEN America Archives will be made available online to the public next Tuesday, July 25.

Poets Sekou Sundiata and Charles Lynch discuss early memories, adolescent anxieties, and the denouement associated with the future of the city in this recording from the 1987 PEN America event “New Urban Voices.”