Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
The PEN Pod: On Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary with Fredrik Backman
“I was going to try to write something about the things that everyday people go around carrying—that feeling that everybody else has their life figured out, except for me.” More
The PEN Pod: On the Debates and the Future of Race and Bias Training with Suzanne Nossel
“This is an administration that, from the beginning, has denigrated the role of the press, has called the press the enemy of the American people.” More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Yamile Saied Méndez
“My job as a writer is to tell my characters’ truth and hope that it will help the reader see the truth in themselves.” More
The PEN Pod: On Knowing We’re Not Alone with BIll Konigsberg
“The misfits have stories to tell. People who feel that way have more of a need to read in some ways, so I think it’s a perfect marriage.” More
The PEN Pod: Unpacking the Presidential Debate and Disinformation with Suzanne Nossel
“The worst thing in the world would be for the president to say something that would be disproven. That has been lost in this administration.” More
The PEN Pod: On Campus Free Speech and Devalued Black Lives with Eddie Cole
“Things are the same in the sense that college presidents are still grappling with how to deal with, say, the traditional white supremacists that disrupt the speech on campus.” More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Jenny Bhatt
“I’m brown, female, middle-aged, immigrant, late-bloomer, Indian, Gujarati, American, South Asian, wife, sister, daughter. All of these make me the writer that I am.” More
The PEN Pod: On Myths, Magic, and Intergenerational Narratives with K-Ming Chang
“There is so much that is inexplicable in myth. There’s so much magic and strangeness, and it doesn’t conform to conventional plot oftentimes—things turning into animals, or pumpkins.” More
The PEN Pod: On Attacks on Journalists, the Punishment of Professors, and Oscars Eligibility Requirements with Suzanne Nossel
“We have 200,000 Americans dead, and [President Trump] wants people to discredit the reporting on it—on the criticism of his handling of the pandemic, on the rifts between him… More
The PEN Pod: Resisting Political Violence and Dictatorship in Belarus with Hanna Komar
“I. . . and we as Belarusians fighting for our freedom, want the world to know that Lukashenko is not our president, because we didn’t vote for him.” More