New York City, June 13, 2013—PEN American Center is pleased to announce that the newly redesigned PEN website, www.pen.org has won Interactive Media Council’s IMA Outstanding Achievement Award in the category of advocacy. The Council’s Interactive Media Awards recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honors individuals and organizations for exceptional work.
“Writers play a crucial role in the human rights movement, and it has never been more pressing to make that work known,” said Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director of PEN American Center. “PEN’s new website provides a lively, dynamic space for human rights supporters to take action to defend threatened writers, share breaking news, and help amplify the voices of PEN’s members on critical free expression issues. We are pleased and honored to be recognized by the Interactive Media Council and look forward to seeing growing numbers of authors and activists come together to defend freedom of expression at PEN.org.”
PEN American Center has worked for decades to build a dynamic literary community united by a shared passion to defend and promote free expression and the free flow of ideas worldwide. The new website aims to foster a virtual community where writers can unite unhampered by national borders or political affiliation, and where PEN’s members and supporters can join together to protect persecuted writers and advance freedom of expression. Key features of the website include:
- Advocacy News feed that provides up-to-date information, articles, interviews, and dispatches from PEN American Center and PEN centers around the world about our free expression initiatives and cases.
- Action tools and social media sharing that make it easy to join our campaigns and take part in PEN’s ongoing advocacy work. Supports can use the new tools to send a letter on behalf of imprisoned Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, Turkish translator and activist Ayşe Berktay, Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega, and many others. The site makes it easy to share actions through social media.
- PEN America Blog, which features new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translations, and interviews from around the world that showcase PEN’s literary and advocacy programming. The new blog pulls from a rich history of archived work by Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and many others.
- Multimedia Archive that uses YouTube and Soundcloud to present hundreds of audio and video recordings that capture cultural icons and iconoclasts whose ideas and actions have transformed the literary and cultural landscapes of our time, and given voice to PEN’s work on behalf of freedom of expression.
- Grants & Awards Database that is the most comprehensive online searchable database of domestic and foreign grants, literary awards, fellowships, and residencies available to writers of all income brackets, at work in all genres, and at various levels of achievement.
PEN American Center partnered with Flyleaf Creative, Caga Idea, and Medium Rare Interactive to design and build the new site. The project was made possible with generous support from the Carnegie Corporation, Google, and individual donations by PEN’s Board of Trustees.
PEN American Center is the largest of the 144 centers of International PEN, the world’s leading literary and human rights organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 to dispel national, ethnic, and racial hatreds and to promote understanding among all countries. PEN American Center, founded a year later, works to defend free expression, advance literature, and to foster international literary fellowship. Its 3,000 distinguished members carry on the achievements in literature and the advancement of human rights of such past members as James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Sontag, and John Steinbeck. To learn more about PEN American Center, please visit: www.pen.org