Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Lynn Steger Strong
“Stories, I would argue, force readers to look and see and come to their own conclusions, to reconsider arguments they might consider predetermined.” More
The PEN Pod: On Systemic Racism in Hollywood with the Writers Guild of America West
Leaders of the Committee of Black Writers at WGA West talked to The PEN Pod about racial justice and equity in Hollywood. More
The PEN Pod: On Race, Place, and Belonging with Sejal Shah
“I’m certainly thinking about kinship. . . What do we owe our neighbors and fellow humans. . . for whom to be alive is a risk?” More
The PEN Pod: Tough Questions with Suzanne Nossel
“To be a more equitable, inclusive, and just society, as well as a society that sustains robust protections for free speech, [we must]. . . reflect all these values.” More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Horror as a genre is “the space of shadows on the wall that we stared at before we went to sleep when we were children and the frightful darkness… More
The PEN Pod: Challenging Our Paradigms with Julia Alvarez
“What [reading] asks of us is to become the other, to become someone else. And those are the same muscles that we use when we’re activists for social justice.“ More
The PEN Pod: On the Small Things We Cannot See That Change Our Lives with Ed Yong
“As journalists, it is our responsibility to resist those easy dichotomies and to find all the missing nuance in the middle that is important, but is also being neglected.“ More
The PEN Pod: On the Inequities of Survival with Megan Giddings
“Our healthcare system in this country is so deeply inequitable and hostile toward the people it’s supposed to serve.“ More
The PEN Pod: Everywhere You Don’t Belong with Gabriel Bump
“What I hope that we can gain from this moment and the Black Lives Matter movement in general is that all Black lives matter.” More
The PEN Pod: Tough Questions with Suzanne Nossel
“It’s extremely important that the public understand how that [electoral] process works and have faith in it, so that we don’t get into a situation where things are polarized.” More
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