Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
An Interview with PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize Winner: Edward Salem
Translating can make a story overly accessible in a way that’s patronizing. I’d rather have the reader experience the unfamiliarity of being in a foreign place. More
An Interview with PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize Winner: Cal Shook
something I hope readers might hold onto is the current of agency that runs through this story, even if the woman at its center seems often adrift. More
An Interview with PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize Winner: Patch Kirschenbaum
It can sometimes be remarkably difficult as a fiction writer to escape the feeling that you are writing into the abyss. More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Donna Barba Higuera
I know that if the book banning continues on its current path, my books will soon follow. More
An Interview with PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize Winner Emma Shannon
There’s no real reason for things to happen, they just happen in whatever spontaneous order they happen in. What makes these things important is the meaning we assign to… More
An Interview with PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize Winner Yasmin Majeed
While writing, I was reckoning with my own feelings of powerlessness and anger, but above all I wanted to honor the long history of political resistance in Pakistan. More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Laura Warrell
It can be excruciating to live with uncertainty and, by creating stories, we can make sense of the nonsensical. We can decide how to act. We can move forward. More
Banned in the USA Q&A: Varian Johnson asks if book bans are meant to ‘keep a certain population of our country down’
For Banned Book Week, PEN America interviews Varian Johnson, author of The Parker Inheritance, which has been banned twice in the 2021-2022 school year. More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Chen Chen
Art matters because it nourishes the heart. Like plums do. Like sunflowers. Like a good, long kiss in this brief, brief life. More
Interview with Stevie Wilson, an incarcerated writer in Pennsylvania
Before incarceration, I was an avid reader and understood the power of language and reading. Upon incarceration, I quickly figured out that the DOC wasn't going to provide the… More