PEN America works tirelessly to defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture. Here are some of the latest ways PEN America is speaking out.
- PEN America elevated two senior leaders to the role of Interim Co-CEO. Following the departure of Suzanne Nossel to a leadership position at Freedom House, Summer Lopez, the chief program officer for Free Expression Programs and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, the chief program officer for Literary Programs will take over in the interim.
- PEN America released a new report Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves documenting over 10000 book bans in the past academic year, a nearly 200% increase. An updated Index of School Book Bans showed 4,231 unique titles were banned during the 2023-2024 school year. Nineteen Minutes by bestselling author Jodi Picoult was the most commonly banned book followed by John Green, Stephen Chbosky, Patricia McCormick, and Jay Asher. PEN America collaborated with Jodi Picoult on a video about her book Nineteen Minutes topping the list of banned books.
- PEN America announced its 2024 Prison Writing Awards, honoring 32 incarcerated writers in various categories including, fiction, poetry, essay, memoir, and drama. The winning entries will be published in a forthcoming anthology.
- PEN America published a blog on the Vietnamese government’s infringement of human rights, particularly on silencing writers, after Anh-Thu Vo, manager of research and advocacy for the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center, spoke last week at a U.N. side event hosted by the International Service for Human Rights.
- PEN America participated in the Freedom to Read Day of Action on October 19 across the country. See photos from the various events.
- PEN America said the pulling of political endorsements for the presidential election from the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post sends a chilling message. “Any action by media owners that suggests the media may defer to pressures is cause for alarm. If they back away now, it sends a deeply worrying message of what may be to come,” the statement said.
- PEN America called for the immediate release and urgent medical attention for Vietnamese journalist, Le Huu Minh Tuan, an editor and member of the Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam (IJAVN), who has been in detention since 2021.
- PEN America said the cancellation of productions, mainly refusing to sign booking arrangements, by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which owns the historic Connelly Theater, in East Village, was pernicious.
- PEN America criticized the cancellation of a lecture by Ruth Behn Giat at the naval academy at the behest of some Republic members of the congress who insinuated that the lecture could violate federal law.
- For the Facts Forward interview series, PEN America’s journalism and disinformation team Mina Haq talked to Dannagal Young, a professor and director of University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication, and Henry Hicks talked to Bill Gates, a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and a lifelong Republican, on the various forms disinformation campaigns take and its effect on the upcoming elections.
- The latest PEN Ten featured Sacha Lamb, who draws from Jewish folklore to tell a genderqueer dybbuk story of spiritual possession set in 1870s Eastern Europe.
