PEN American Center

This is about the PEN center for the Eastern half of the USA. For the Western half see PEN Center USA

PEN American Center
A Global Literary Community
Abbreviation	EA
Motto	Protecting Free Expression and Celebrating Literature
Formation	1922
Type	Literary society,Human Rights Organization
Legal status	Association
Purpose/focus	Publication, Advocacy, Literary Awards
Headquarters	London, UK
Location	New York City
Coordinates	40.724920°N 73.997163°W / 40.724920; -73.997163
Region served	Eastern Half of USA
Membership	Private
Official languages	English
President	Kwame Anthony Appiah
Key people	Board of Trustees
Parent organization	International PEN
Affiliations	International Freedom of Expression Exchange
Website	pen.org
Remarks	PEN American Center is the representative of International Pen -for Eastern Half of USA

PEN American Center (PEN), founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. The Center has a membership of 3,300 writers, editors, and translators. PEN American Center is the largest of the 144 centers that belong to International PEN, the worldwide association of writers that defends those who are harassed, imprisoned and killed for their views. PEN American Center is one of two PEN centers located in the USA, the other is PEN Center USA in Los Angeles, it covers the USA west of the Mississippi.

Full membership in PEN generally requires the publication of two or more books of a literary character or one book that has won a major prize. Editors with a career of five years or more are also eligible, as are many publishers, agents, and other members of the literary profession. Recently, PEN created an associate tier of membership, which is open to the general public.

Over the years, PEN American Center's membership has included many of the leading lights in the American literary establishment, including James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and John Steinbeck.

In addition to defending persecuted writers, PEN American Center sponsors public literary programs and forums on current issues, sends prominent authors to inner-city schools to encourage reading and writing, administers literary prizes, promotes international literature that might otherwise go unread in the United States, and offers grants and loans to writers facing financial or Medical Emergencies.

PEN is also a member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, a global network of nongovernmental organizations that monitors free expression violations worldwide and defends journalists, writers, human rights activists and Internet users who are persecuted for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

PEN World Voices Festival

Since 2005, PEN American Center has hosted the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City, which brings renowned writers from around the world together to share ideas, give public readings and talks, and foster debate on literature and freedom of expression.

Awards program

PEN American Center has an extensive program of annual awards and fellowships that serve to recognize recent outstanding endeavours in various literary fields and to encourage different forms of literary production:

• PEN Beyond Margins Award, for books by authors of color.
• PEN Translation Prize, for book-length translations from any language into English.
• PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, for book-length translations from any language into English.
• PEN Publisher Award, for publishers in general.
• PEN/Translation Fund Grants, available since 2004 to support the translation of book-length works of fiction or creative non-fiction that have either not previously appeared in English, or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed translation.
• PEN Writers Fund, an emergency fund for professional writers with serious financial difficulties.
• PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
• PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers whose début works are deemed to show "great promise".
• PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award
• PEN/Nora Magid Award, for magazine publishing.
• PEN/Malamud Award, annual award for excellence in the art of the short story.
• PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, for literary translators who have shown "a commitment to excellence".
• PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, for children's or young-adult fiction.
• PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award
• PEN/Katherine Anne Porter First Amendment Award
• PEN/Nabokov Award, for writers who have made achievements "in a variety of literary genres".
• PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, for emerging poets.
• PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama: a medal for an accomplished dramatist, and a stipend for an up-and-coming playwright.
• PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, for U.S. poets with a "notable and accomplished presence".
• PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, established in 2011.

2011 Literary Awards Festival

PEN American Center awarded Winners and Runner-up of 2011 PEN Literary Award on October 12, 2011, at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium in New York City. The list of the winners of the Award in various categories are;

• PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000)

Susanna Daniel, Stiltsville (Harper Perennial), Danielle Valore Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead)

• PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000)

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (Scribner)

• PEN/W. G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career ($10,000)

Aleksandar Hemon

• PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000)

Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2010)

• PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards for an American Playwright in Mid-Career and a Master American Dramatist ($7,500)

American Playwright in Mid-Career: Marcus Gardley

Master American Dramatist: David Henry Hwang

• PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($5,000)

Mark Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations (Graywolf Press)

• PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000)

George Dohrmann, Play Their Hearts Out (Ballantine Books)

• PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000)

Roger Angell

• PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown and Company)

• PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry ($5,000)

Ishion Hutchinson, Far District (Peepal Tree Press)

• PEN/Nora Magid Award ($5,000)

Brigid Hughes, Founding Editor of A Public Space

• PEN Open Book Award ($5,000)

Manu Joseph, Serious Men (W. W. Norton & Company)

• PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000)

Lucy Frank, Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling, a novel in verse

• PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)

Khaled Mattawa, Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press, The Margellos World Republic of Letters Series)

• PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)

Ibrahim Muhawi, Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago Books)

• PEN Emerging Writers Awards ($1,660)

Fiction: Smith Henderson (nominated by Hannah Tinti of One Story)

Nonfiction: David Stuart MacLean (nominated by Ladette Randolph of Ploughshares)

Poetry: Adam Day (nominated by Erica Wright of Guernica)

PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers

PEN America is a semi-annual literary journal that publishes fiction, poetry, conversation, criticism, and memoir. It was founded in 2000, and named one of that year's "Ten Best New Magazines" by Library Journal. Work from recent issues has been selected for Best American Essays (of The Best American Series) and the Pushcart Prize. Contributors include Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham, Nikki Giovanni, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, John Edgar Wideman, and many others.

PEN Prison Writing Program

Founded in 1971, the PEN Prison Writing Program believes in the restorative and rehabilitative power of writing, by providing hundreds of inmates across the country with skilled writing teachers and audiences for their work. The program seeks to provide a place for inmates to express themselves freely with paper and pen and to encourage the use of the written word as a legitimate form of power. The program sponsors an annual writing contest, publishes a free handbook for prisoners, provides one-on-one mentoring to inmates whose writing shows merit or promise, conducts workshops for former inmates, and seeks to get inmates' work to the public through literary publications and readings.

Involvement in Theater

PEN American Center along with The American Civil Liberties Union and the Film Society of Lincoln Center presented a special performance of “Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the ‘War on Terror’” on May 24, 2011 at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. The performance was directed by Doug Liman, and was focused on featuring readings from formerly secret government documents and videos, that shone a light on the scope and human cost of the Post 9/11 torture program.

See also

• International PEN
• Media of New York City
• PEN Canada

External links

• PEN American Center
• PEN Events Audio Archive
• PEN Podcasts
• International PEN
• PEN American Center archives at Princeton University
• PEN American Center's Official Facebook Page