“They are not just a challenge in an individual school system or library, but legislation being introduced in statehouses that would affect the availability of books all over the state in every school and library.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel about the intensifying efforts across the United States to ban specific books related to LGBTQIA+ issues, race, and freedom of speech.

“I’m also asking you to unleash the cry of the subconscious, and to listen and record that voice from within without fear or judgment. Listening to yourself in that way is actually a radical act of self-love.” Ananda Naima González leads an exercise in asemic writing for PEN to Paper, a video series of original writing exercises from authors participating in PEN America’s 2020 Digital World Voices Festival: These Truths.

“They’ve asked that the bookstore be cleared away during the event / they say it’s no place to sell books…” As part of the Writers in Residence at-home video series for PEN America’s 2020 Digital World Voices Festival, Oksana Vasyakina reads her poem “These people didn’t know my father,” translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky. 

In this PEN to Paper series video, PEN America president Jennifer Egan guides viewers through a short writing exercise involving a “word throw,” designed to help writers to free up their minds to the unconscious imagination. The series is part of PEN America’s 2020 World Voices Festival: These Truths, held digitally this year.

“I have an obligation to human beings, my characters, so that’s all I care about.” In this PEN International interview, Yiyun Li speaks about the expectation as a Chinese American writer to be a spokesperson for a particular experience, and how she enjoys exploring the interior struggles of her characters. Li won the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her novel Where Reasons End (Random House, 2020).

“Some prisons taste like / salt, copper, sludge / when you bite and crunch down / to the marrow...” In this video, Cortney Lamar Charleston reads Jevon Jackson’s poem “All of Us, In Prison” at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery for a 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival event. Jackson’s poem won PEN America’s First Prize in Poetry in the 2019 Prison Writing Contest.

“I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became / a character in the news...” Khaled Hosseini, Rita Dove, Philip Gourevitch, and Siri Hustvedt read Liu Xia’s poem “June 2nd, 1989” from Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. PEN America and Amnesty International collaborated on the video series as a call to free Liu Xia from house arrest in Beijing, where she has been held since her late husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009.

“Understand we have never seen an apple, so we are completely free from apples.” In this 2014 video of the first PEN DIY series event, Natalie Diaz breaks down five personal steps to writing about family, and discusses her poetry with Mike Albo.

In this video, MacDowell Colony chairman Michael Chabon presents Toni Morrison with the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts and American culture. Morrison, who received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center, tells a packed audience about how she became a writer and the inspiration for her first novel, The Bluest Eye.