PEN America Takes the Coward’s Way Out

PEN America, one of the country’s leading literary organizations, canceled its annual awards ceremony after nearly half the nominees dropped out to protest the group’s stance on the Israel/Gaza war.

Teetering: PEN America’s World Voices Festival, slated for May but also hampered by multiple cancellations.

At issue are PEN America’s statements about the war and the group’s actions, which numerous writers and critics have vilified for months as too weak. The complaints, enshrined in a cascade of open letters, are a roadmap of the intense pressure in many corners of the literary community to respond to the conflict’s horrors in a specific and particular way.

Twenty-eight of the nominees for PEN America’s 2024 awards ceremony, scheduled for April 29, withdrew. That includes all but one of the 10 candidates for the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Prize. At the behest of Jean Stein’s estate, PEN America will donate the prize money to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

A nonprofit founded in 1922, PEN America bills itself as devoted to free expression and championing the freedom to write. It has been at the forefront of the fights against banning books and educational censorship across the United States.

But its critics have intensified and mushroomed in number since Oct. 7, calling on the group to make a stronger public stand against Israel and its conduct in war.

In February, PEN America received an open letter signed by hundreds of writers and others in the literary community, commanding it to make a statement that clearly called out Israel: “We demand PEN America release an official statement about the 225 poets, playwrights, journalists, scholars and novelists killed in Gaza and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.” (The letter now has more than 1,000 signatures.)

On March 13, some speakers, moderators and an honorary co-chair of the PEN America World Voices Festival said they would not participate in the May event due to the group’s lack of action and past oppositionto cultural boycotts: “In the context of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, we believe that PEN America has betrayed the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere.” Among the signatories: civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), British novelist and former English PEN deputy president Hari Kunzru, short-story writer Lorrie Moore and Doppelganger author Naomi Klein.

On March 20, PEN America issued its own open letter, detailing its more than 35 statements about aspects of the war and its effects, including opposition to suspensions of Students for Justice in Palestine and college faculty supportive of Palestine, call-outs of government efforts to curb speech critical of Israel and, ironically, criticism of the award-ceremony cancellation for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli.

“We were planning a substantial focus on the conflict at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, including a panel tentatively entitled ‘The Palestinian Exception to Free Speech’ that was to have included several of the writers who have now told us they will not take part in the Festival,” PEN America said.

It also announced a $100,000 earmark for Palestinian writers in the group’s emergency fund.

Still, criticism continued, as multiple nominees for the 2024 PEN America literary awards began to withdraw their works from consideration.

On April 3, nine former PEN America presidents issued a joint statement imploring writers to come together at the World Voices Festival.

“PEN America has always embraced dissent in its ranks, recognizing that writing is an act of conscience, and that authors must be free to follow their own,” the statement read. “Indeed, PEN World Voices has been a place for writers to debate and disagree – and for all of us to benefit from the rich exchanges.

“Never has participation in PEN America’s programs and events implied acquiescence with PEN America’s policies or stances – nor anything else, for that matter.”

This year’s festival includes a planned tribute to former PEN America president Salman Rushdie, who founded the event 20 years ago to convene an array of thinkers in a post-9/11 world.

Nevertheless, open letters continued. In an April 17 missive to PEN America leadership, some of the awards’ nominated authors decried what they called the group’s “disgraceful inaction” and “lack of proportional empathy.”

PEN America’s statements “were often laced with ahistorical, Zionist propaganda under the guise of neutrality. Neutrality is a betrayal of justice,” charged the nominees, who include political strategist and poet Camonghne Felix, professor and writer Christina Sharpe and debut novelist James Frankie Thomas. They called for the resignations of multiple PEN America leaders, including CEO Suzanne Nossel and the entire executive committee.

PEN America shot back in a statement to LitHub, adding that critics refused to meet with organizational leaders in person to discuss. “The perspective that ‘there is no disagreement’ and that there are among us final arbiters of ‘fact and fiction’ reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity,” a spokesperson said.

Even so, PEN America’s current president, Jennifer Finney Boylan, announced April 18 that a committee would review the past decade of PEN America’s work with an eye towards ensuring alignment with its mission. This panel also will make recommendations for the group’s efforts going forward.

“I view this criticism as an opportunity, and I am grateful to the dissenting authors for their passion and for the urgency of their request,” wrote Boylan, the author of multiple books, including 2023’s Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult.

Boylan’s letter, topped with a discordant musing on collective nouns, did little to assuage concerns.

On April 22, PEN America’s Literary Programming Chief Officer Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf announced the “difficult decision” to cancel its awards ceremony, adding that “we greatly respect” that writers have followed their consciences.

Asked by the Washington Post if the World Voices Festival would still go on as planned, CEO Nossel said, “You know, that’s hard to say.”

“Look, our community is very divided,” Nossel said. “We’re an organization that’s prided itself on building this broad constituency and engaging all sorts of voices on all sorts of topics, and we’re very committed to doing that and trying to make that possible, even when it’s the most challenging. So, you know, I’d say we’re in a troubleshooting mode, trying to figure out the best way to fulfill this mission at kind of an unprecedented time.”