Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Grace E. Lavery
My work is to try to understand the methods of self-knowing and self-becoming that trans people have used for a century and a half. More
Banned in the USA Spotlight: George M. Johnson
George M. Johnson, author of one of the most banned books in America, is now one of the author plaintiffs in PEN America et al v. Escambia County School… More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Jane Wong
I think often of my familial ancestors and what trickled into me – were they poets too? More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Dareen Tatour
“From the moment the soldiers entered my house and took me, I felt that poetry was waiting for me." More
World Voices Festival: Marlon James
At the 2023 PEN America World Voices Festival, Marlon James is hosting a fireside chat with Nigerian-British writer Ben Okri, followed by a panel on the second novel with… More
World Voices Festival: Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh will discuss the challenge of keeping up with online discourse at her opening night panel at PEN America’s World Voices Festival, “Ottessa Moshfegh Presents: Why Write?" More
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the World Voices Festival
Ta-Nehisi Coates hopes to contextualize the flurry of censorship across the United States in his Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture on May 11 at PEN America’s World Voices… More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Emma Ramadan
The myth that “translations don’t sell” and that the average reader will turn their nose up at a book if they see it is a translation has been disproven… More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Tyriek White
It is why there is so much investment, politically and even historically, in the erasure of books by certain communities or voices. Writing about alternate paths forward can create… More
Banned in the USA Spotlight: Maia Kobabe
Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer is a coming-of-age graphic novel that has been the most banned in U.S. schools. Kobabe tells PEN America what books like hers mean. More