Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
The PEN Ten with Moustafa Bayoumi
"A writer’s “revolutionary duty,” as Gabriel García Márquez once put it, is 'to write well.' The responsibility of a human being, on the other hand, is to practice compassion… More
The PEN Ten with Robin Coste Lewis
"I have a responsibility to history to get out of the way and try as best I can to document what I see, even if it is internal, because… More
Interview with Christopher Merrill and Robert Shapard, Editors of Flash Fiction International
Robert Shapard and Christopher Merrill, co-editors of the anthology Flash Fiction International, in conversation about the form and translating it. More
The PEN Ten with Adriana E. Ramírez
Adriana Ramírez is the winner of the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize for her manuscript "Dead Boys," which takes an unflinching look at the bodies of those who have… More
The PEN Ten with Kelly Braffet
"So many of the awful things I see in the real world seem at their heart to stem from a failure of empathy, from an unwillingness to see those… More
The PEN Ten with Achy Obejas
"My most recurrent images involve water, and specifically, our rescue in the Straits of Florida when we escaped from Cuba: our small wooden fishing boat up against a giant… More
Three Questions with Brian Blanchfield
I uncover here a responsibility I feel—to attempt disinhibition, to include affective knowledge, to be inside the body, to report from a place of personal discomfort or unease. Ursula… More
The PEN Ten with Rob Spillman
"I do believe there is a collective purpose to telling the stories that people know to be true, but that they have not yet been able to articulate, or… More
Three Questions with Dawn Lundy Martin
Are there languages of hierarchy that can attend to the difference between the lack of privilege experienced by the black body in America and the overt censorship in some… More
The PEN Ten with Andrew Malan Milward
"That’s one of the interesting ironies of being a writer: It’s something you do in isolation and yet it’s something that connects to and unites, not only other writers… More
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