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’s Laura Benitez, Amy Reid, and Jonathan Friedman reported that more than 70 bills and policies across 26 states would censor higher education — and 22 of them have become law in 16 states. They include a educational gag orders that directly censor academic teaching, as well as laws that target tenure and traditional faculty governance, intervene in how academic and non-academic programs are run and overseen, manipulate accreditation practices, and mandate institutional neutrality in ways that silence important speech. Read the full report and state-by-state breakdown.
- We welcomed our 2025 Emerging Voices Fellows – Trini Bui, Danielle Shandiin Emerson, Leila Farjami, Elisabeth Vasquez Hein, Varun U. Shetty, Pegah Ouji, Ava Pauline Emilione, Emily del Carmen Ramirez, and Solomon Tesfaye. The nine writers, chosen from a record pool of applicants, will receive a stipend and a five-month immersive mentorship. Meet the incoming fellows and their mentors.
- PEN America joined PEN Georgia and PEN International in a joint submission to the U.N. Human Rights Council detailing the ways Georgian authorities are severely curbing freedom of expression in the country and urging U.N. member states to hold Georgia accountable. Read the full statement.
- Clare Carter and Amy Reid of the Freedom to Learn team wrote about university presidents stepping down due to external pressures in the past year as higher education especially comes under the Trump administration’s attack, and what they can learn from the latest casualty in University of Virginia’s president, James Ryan. Read some lessons in leadership here.
- PEN America’s Manager of Education Policy, McKenna Samson, broke down how the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has ugly repercussions in higher education — from making education less affordable and accessible to further helping the dismantling of the whole system. Read more here.
- PEN America submitted a testimony to the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Tourism, Arts, and Culture Development defending the state’s Freedom to Read Act. Read more here.
- PEN America joined with the Free Our Art coalition to support reintroduction of the Restoring Artistic Protection Act (RAP Act), calling on Congress to pass this important legislation which limits the use of creative works as evidence in court proceedings. Washington Managing Director Hadar Harris also spoke at a press conference for the coalition. Read more about it here.
- PEN America called President Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal an effort to chill accountability reporting—a familiar component of the playbook of media retaliation. Read more here.
- Anna Nemzer of the Russian Independent Media Archive – a joint project of PEN America – wrote about Trump’s bid to take control of the National Archives’ leadership and the danger when truth, as in Russia, begins to disappear. Read her op-ed in The Hill.
- PEN America’s Amy Reid was quoted in a story by AP and ABC Eye Witness News Today about how efforts to control higher education are underway and going beyond just Harvard. Read the AP story here and the ABC story here.
- PEN America Freedom to Read Program Director Kasey Meehan was quoted in a story by Kirkus Reviews on the 596 books banned by the defense department in its schools. Read the story here.
- PEN America’s Journalism and Disinformation Program Director, Tim Richardson, was quoted in a piece by NBC News about GOP’s funding cuts will devastate public media. Read the story here.
- Richardson was also quoted in a piece by the Huffington Post on President Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal. Read the story here.
For this week’s PEN Ten, Julia Goldberg interviewed Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond about her latest book, My Parents’ Marriage, discussing weddings, time periods, and the importance of setting. Read the full interview here.
