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 released its annual Freedom to Write Index, which tracks the number of writers imprisoned and at risk globally. The Index recorded 375 writers in prison across 40 countries in 2024, an increase from 339 writers across 33 countries in 2023. “Authoritarian regimes are desperate to control the narrative of history and repress the truth about what they are doing. That is why writers are so important, and why we see these regimes attempting to silence them,” said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, PEN America’s director of writers at risk. Read our press release here, the report here, and our coverage in The Guardian and The Independent.
- PEN America shared a statement from authors and illustrators of nine books facing censorship involved in the Supreme Court case, Mahmoud v Taylor. “Hiding our books away sends a devastating message to students: that their lives and their families are so dangerous that they cannot be discussed in school,” they said. Read the full statement here. PEN America urged the Supreme Court to reject imposing court-mandated classroom “opt outs” in response to Maryland public school parents who don’t want their children exposed to LGBTQ-themed books. Read more here and the coverage of the case in The Washington Post’s Book Club newsletter by Ron Charles, The 19th, and a letter written by PEN America’s legal fellow, Elly Brinkley, here.
- PEN America announced A Pledge to Our Democracy—a powerful call-to-action endorsed by more than 100 former college and university presidents and chancellors representing all sectors of higher education, from research universities to community colleges, regional comprehensives, and HBCUs. Read more about the pledge here.
- In case you missed it: With the 20th World Voices Festival, PEN America is bringing back some of the biggest names in literature to New York City’s Greenwich Village and Los Angeles from April 30 to May 3. Tickets are selling out, get yours here.
- We are also celebrating exemplary literature from 2024 with the 61st annual Literary Awards Ceremony. Here are the finalists, and grab a seat at the ‘Oscars for Books’ here.
- PEN America announced the 12 winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Now in its ninth year, the award annually recognizes 12 emerging writers for an outstanding debut short story. Here is the full list of winners.
- PEN America shared news that a school district in west Houston that banned the state of Virginia’s flag for violating the school board’s policy against frontal nudity. Read more here.
- PEN America called it a “tragic new low” that the Naval Academy cancelled a scheduled lecture with author and philosopher Ryan Holiday after he refused to remove slides from his presentation critical of the academy’s removal of nearly 400 books about race and gender from its main library. “Books are not the enemy; ignorance is the enemy,” reiterated Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director of PEN America’s U.S. Free Expression programs. Read our press statement here.
- PEN America’s Florida office director, William Johnson, wrote an op-ed in The Miami Herald about a new bill in the legislature that would worsen book bans if passed. Florida already leads the country in banning books. Read it here. PEN America also signed onto a letter addressed to the lawmakers about the harmful nature of the proposed law. Read more about it in Publisher’s Weekly here.
- PEN America hosted a hybrid event, ‘Secrets of Publishing: A Conversation with Literary Agents, Editors, and Authors’ at New York City’s P&T Knitwear. Award-winning author Susan Shapiro expertly moderated a lively conversation with literary agents Kate McKean, Pronoy Sarkar, and Marin Takikawa, editors Nana Twusami (Hachette) and Emi Ikkanda (Penguin Random House), and author Lester Fabian Braithwaite.
- For this week’s PEN Ten, we spoke to PEN International president, Burhan Sönmez about his latest book, Lovers of Franz K. Set in the period of the Cold War, the book explores two opposing characters who later become partners in an expedition to expose who truly was behind the attempted assination of Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod. Read the full interview with Summer Lopez, PEN America’s interim Co-CEO Chief Program Officer of Free Expression, here.
- While romance continues to be the most banned genre across the United States, love has been in the air at PEN America as we celebrated some of the biggest names in the genre with our series with Authors Against Book Bans, Shelf Love. For our last installment, we spoke to Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings—the duo who write under the pen name Christina Lauren. Read our interview here.
