Recognitions
I had read no Proust at the time. I was much struck by the freedom from constraint and expectation I suddenly enjoyed. Thereafter, I could complicate my sentences and… More
Bad Behavior
Prose fiction was born Protestant. It is a child of the Enlightenment, and though it has some exotic forebears—romance most nearly, drama and poetry further back—it could only have… More
Maureen Howard: Leaps of Faith
Your letters had settled into friendship, and you wrote that you were learning to walk on crutches and felt like “a large stiff anthropoid ape who has no… More
Nadine Gordimer: Cross-Pollination
"Cross-Pollination," by Nadine Gordimer, appears in PEN America 2: Home and Away. This talk was originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust, sponsored by the PEN American… More
The Subtleties of Violence
As in the movies, there are in literature certain kinds of violence that themselves seem to do harm, that seem be acts of violence committed upon the reader as… More
On Wise Blood
As Flannery’s friend, as well as her editor and publisher from the start, I marveled at her excellence as a writer and regretted her early death. I first met… More
Portable Cultures, Global Identities: Panel Discussion
I knew my friends were right: in school I had learned about my ancestors’ bravery, about how they fought the slave trade successfully. But I hated this history. I… More
Alert Us
Are you an artist at risk or know someone who is?
PEN America On 
The Waukee school district removed three LGBTQ books from the Northwest High School library last week after someone requested a review of their contents, school officials say. https://bit.ly/3jGN4yN
PEN America, alongside 10 other human rights organizations, calls on the Egyptian authorities to immediately release journalist Tawfik Ghanem, who has been arbitrarily detained for 150 days solely because of his media work. https://thefreedomi.org/releases/joint-statement-calls-on-egypt-to-immediately-release-journalist-tawfik-ghanem-after-150-days-in-detention/
Final reading below! Massive thank you to everyone at @PENamerica, the fellows, @jennybhatt, and my mentor Patricia Engel. What an incredible time this has been with the PEN America 2021 Emerging Voices fellowship @pen_ev... https://pen.org/event/2021-emerging-voices-final-reading
