International PEN, the parent organization of PEN American Center, recently launched a "virtual demonstration" to raise awareness about freedom of expression in China as protests continue during the twenty-one-nation Olympic torch relay leading up to the Beijing games in August. The international association of writers arranged to have the poem "June" by imprisoned Chinese poet and journalist Shi Tao translated into over sixty languages. The poem is being sent electronically to cities around the world to correspond to the different destinations of the Olympic torch.

 

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and for the first time since 1922—the year poetry was entered as a category—two poets took home the honors.

 

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop announced today the appointment of Ken Chen to the post of executive director of the organization. His predecessor, Quang Bao, stepped down in January.

On Tuesday, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the winners of the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards. Ten poets and seven fiction writers from the United States and Canada who demonstrate "distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment" each received grants averaging $43,157.

 

A half-hour documentary on a local writing workshop that began in southern New Hampshire in 1974 is being aired on public television stations across the country during National Poetry Month. Mondays at Skimmilk: 30 Years of Writers at Work, directed by Ken Browne, originally aired last April on New Hampshire Public Television, but has since been picked up by American Public Television and is being presented on nearly fifty PBS stations in more than two dozen states.

Two weeks after customs officials detained British memoirist Sebastian Horsley and prevented him from entering the United States, the PEN American Center has issued a letter of appeal to the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to review the case and allow the author to return to the country. Horsley, who flew back to the U.K. after the incident at Newark Liberty International Airport on March 18, has been invited to paricipate in PEN's World Voices Festival of International Literature at the end of this month.

 

Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead) was recently named the winner of the 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year Award in the category of fiction by the American Booksellers Association. Barbara Kingsolver, along with coauthors Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, won in nonfiction for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins).