Some days, it’s hard not to feel terrified by the threats that AI poses to writers and readers alike. But PEN America’s 62nd annual Literary Awards Ceremony, which celebrates all that creative expression is and can be, reminded us why we shouldn’t lose faith in the future of our literary landscape. Over the course of the evening, we honored standout works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, essays, and more, giving out $350,000 across 10 prize categories. (And we had an absolute blast doing it.)
On the red carpet and backstage, PEN America asked what writers can do that AI can’t. Here are six of our favorite answers.
“Everything.”
“Everything,” said Jared Lemus, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.
“I don’t think that creativity is ever going to be replaced by something like AI that doesn’t have soul,” he continued. “It doesn’t have trauma. It doesn’t have any of those things that make us human and help us write good sentences.”
Lemus took home the Bingham prize for Guatemalan Rhapsody, a kaleidoscopic portrait of Guatemala.
“Imagine impossible things.”
Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota artist and writer Cannupa Hanska Luger gave the response with little hesitation. But he was at a loss for words later that night, when he learned that SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide won the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. “Whaaat?” he cried.
He went on to describe the book, a genre-bending work of Indigenous futurism, and the inspiration behind it: a U.S. Military Survival Guide gifted to him as a joke. “I imagined my audience was in a future far from now,” he said. “You proved me wrong.”
“Be original.”
All AI can do is “feed off of our collective work,” said Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat, who was honored with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “The AI is fast, and there’s seduction in that, but letting something stew and just creating something completely new is something powerful that writers and other creators can do that the AI can’t.”
At the ceremony, Tony-nominated Haitian-American actor Pascale Armand gave a world-premiere reading from Danticat’s novel, Dèy, which follows a Haitian-American woman whose sense of self is fractured after she lives through a random act of violence.
“Have an impulse to make.”
Playwright Julia Cho, who won the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, admitted that she doesn’t know how AI creations are received in comparison to human creations. “But I do know that what we make is what makes us,” she said, “and so I feel very strongly that the human need to create is something that AI can’t take away, that there are things that will be created by AI but that humans will still, in our dark corners, make poems, make blankets, make whatever it is.”
Cho was brought to tears when Tony Award–winning playwright David Henry Hwang presented her with the career achievement award. “Thank you for reminding me who I am — that I’m a writer, that it’s the time now more than ever to write, and I will do my best to create work to be worthy of this honor,” she said.
“Speak to the human spirit.”
Writers can “really speak to the human mind and the human experience,” said Alex Treuber, one of 12 winners of the 2026 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. AI can’t accomplish that task, he added, and it’s obvious. “There’s an uncanny valley thing where we know it when we see it: It’s not quite real.”
Read Treuber’s piece here, and check out the other 11 winning short stories here.
“Feel.”
The one-word answer came from Nicholas Boggs, whose book Baldwin: A Love Story won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. The judges called his work “a landmark achievement.”
“To be recognized in this way really means that I’m amplifying many other voices, including [Baldwin’s] and people he knew — and it just means a lot to be recognized as a writer in my own right as well,” he told PEN America.
Couldn’t make the ceremony? See the full list of winners and catch up on everything you missed.
