Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
Life Is Messy, Writing Is Messy: An Interview with Danielle Evans
I sometimes wonder what critics would say if they couldn’t mention race until the second paragraph. It’s a shame, because the book is really about so many other things.… More
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One Onion Layer After Another: A Conversation with Valzhyna Mort
The village where I spent my childhood summers, away from the city and school, is the landscape that has become my tabula rasa, the primary point of any departure.… More
I Am an American Guy: A Conversation with Catherine Wagner
Some of my poems start as songs (dummkopf simple songs, I wish I would write a bridge). When the words curve around the music, there’s a path that swerves… More
An Interview with Rotimi Babatunde, 2012 Caine Prize Winner
“The past is not dead. It is not even past,” according to one of Faulkner’s characters. In writing “Bombay’s Republic”, my primary objective was to investigate how the past… More
Sex Is More Important: A Conversation with Dante Micheaux
Eros, or eroticism, functions in my poetry as rhythm. Poetic thinking, as opposed to transactional thinking, is quite fast because it is associative—there is no formula on which the… More
Reading Is Not Optional: An Interview with Walter Dean Myers
Your recent YA novel Kick involved a collaboration between you and a high school student, with you and the student trading off writing chapters—you writing in the voice of… More
Permanent Piece: A Conversation with Brett Fletcher Lauer
It is both the religious authority and mystical confidence coupled with the presentation of the extraordinary as matter of fact that appeals to my sensibility. More
PEN America 15: Maps
In the latest issue of PEN America, we wanted to explore how writers encounter and examine the fictional topographies of their lives. More
Opening Up to the Family of Nations: A Conversation with Tom Fleming
The reason I joined PEN is really quite simple. I had been censored. More
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