Authors group pushes for NSA reform, while there’s still time
With yet another attempt to reform the National Security Agency up for debate on Capitol Hill this month, 29 writers, including Dave Eggers and Edward Albee, wrote an open… More
Leading Authors Agree: Mass Surveillance is Censorship
Edward Albee, Don DeLillo, John Green, Rachel Kushner, and twenty-five other leading American writers joined PEN American Center today in an open letter to the Senate leadership demanding National… More
Open letter to Senate leadership: Mass surveillance is censorship
Dear Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa); and Select Committee on Intelligence Chairwoman… More
‘Klinghoffer’ Composer Responds to Met’s Decision
John Adams said he learned that the Metropolitan Opera was scrapping plans to transmit his opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” to movie theaters around the world when the Met’s… More
A Culture of Surveillance
The harms that surveillance brings are not limited to the moment—they ripple out in time and space. College students are silenced so their communities lose a generation of outspoken… More
“Spiritual support from West fosters separatism in Xinjiang”, featured in China’s Global Times
The PEN American Center, a literary and human rights organization, announced on Monday that it would award Ilham Tohti, formerly an economics professor of the Minzu University of China… More
PEN Haiti’s Beautiful New House of Literature
Our Freedom Write fellow on his visit to PEN Haiti's extraordinary new Maison Georges Anglade as part of an intercultural exchange supported by the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. The… More
Activist at Heart: A Conversation with South African Cartoonist Zapiro
Zapiro is South Africa’s most celebrated cartoonist. His penetrating cartoons hold the country’s power brokers to account, lampooning everyone from former president Nelson Mandela to the late cricket star… More
Kathy Park Hong Reads from “The Flowers of Hell” by Nguyen Chi Thien
In the Jungle Night a Bird CallsIn the jungle night a strange bird callsFollowed by a guard’s tripping shoe soundsA patrol flashlight beams here and thereFrom the cells come… More
Further Questions about Child Slavery in China’s Kilns
It has been nearly two months since the shocking news of the “black kilns” run on slave labor in Shanxi came to light. But consider the storm of public… More