On Revising Our Relationships to Power

Why I declined the PEN America Jean Stein Award longlist.

As writers, so much of our gratitude goes to the institutions that help to fund the lives and livelihoods of writers. Because of this power dynamic, we are conditioned to focus on appealing to these institutions, on making work that will be satisfying to the gatekeepers the institutions employ to validate the value of our work. 

What would it look like to revise those relationships? To put our emphasis on devaluing and invalidating these cultural institutions, these cultural monopolies, so that we are a community less reliant on the whims, standards and politics of Big Publishing and more reliant on the standards and politics of our peers? What would it look like for writers to revise their relationships to power?

In April, I made the choice to decline an acknowledgement from PEN America, and remove myself from the Jean Stein longlist, which awards $75,000 to the winner. 

$75,000 is a weighty figure. $75,000 would change my life. $75k would change my family’s lives. But PEN’s approach to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians taints that money. PEN’s willingness to disregard the lives and right to life of Palestinians taints that money. What is $75K worth when the lives of Palestinian people are worth so little to the organization dangling a carrot stick in our faces, forcing us to turn away from harm in order to turn towards the needs of our lives. We should not have to make that compromise. And 9/10 of the Jean Stein nominees chose not to, invalidating the entire award, which could not be given away by default. At the request of the Jean Stein estate, the prize money was donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. 

And then the PEN awards ceremony was canceled. 

Below is the letter the Jean Stein longlisters drafted and signed onto, which we sent to the CEO, President and Board of PEN America. This letter sparked a watershed of press and social media commentary that helped to disrupt PEN’s business as usual and inspired many other writers to consider their own relationships to this institution. Do we need an institution that advocates for free speech, but ignores the silencing of Palestinian voices? Do we need an institution that is known for its advocacy around banned books, but elevates groups like Moms for Justice that advocate for the banning of books. 

We do not have to accept these contradictions and inconsistencies. We get to decide what institutions we validate, and who we allow to validate us. 

This letter lived in my drafts before it went wide. And now it belongs to all of us:

To the Executive Board & Trustees of PEN America,

We, the undersigned longlisters and awardees of the PEN/Jean Stein, PEN/Dau, PEN/Bingham, PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Voelcker, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, PEN Translation, PEN/Manheim, PEN/Heim Translation, and PEN Award for Literature in Translation, are writing to inform you that we reject these honors conferred by your organization in protest of your failure to confront the genocide in Gaza. Though that rejection takes a variety of forms, with some authors choosing to decline their recognitions altogether, we stand in solidarity with one another and with the people of Palestine in our refusal to lend our names and tacit approval to PEN America’s disgraceful inaction.

Since October 7th, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered and over 70,000 injured by the state of Israel. As we write this, more than a million people in Gaza are facing a catastrophic lack of food, as a result of Israel’s starvation policy. This is an indubitable tactic of genocide. 

Since October 7th, thousands of writers have written and signed letters demanding that PEN America speak out and stand in solidarity with Palestinian writers. PEN America waited days to speak on this incomparable loss of Palestinian life -- and when PEN did decide to speak, the statements that followed show a lack of proportional empathy, and were often laced with ahistorical, Zionist propaganda hidden under the guise of neutrality. Neutrality is indeed a betrayal and PEN’s statements and actions demonstrate not only an immoral reliance on corporate dollars, but a lack of writerly courage. PEN America states that "the core" of its mission is to "support the right to disagree." There is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. Israel is leading a genocide of Palestinian people. PEN’s perpetuation of false equivalences, their equivocation and normalizing, is indeed a betrayal. The forcible removal of Randa Jarrar from a PEN-sponsored event represents a breach of trust between PEN America and a Palestinian writer whose speech and physical safety they should have protected, and whose voice they should have heard.

PEN America's leadership has eroded our confidence in its mission, and the important work they claim to support; instead, they cling to a disingenuous façade of neutrality, while simultaneously parroting hasbara talking points. We have been appalled to learn that management has sought to suppress the off-hours political speech and activity of its own workers, in part by suggesting language by which staffers could be punished for participating in any political activity that undermines PEN America’s mission. Yet that stated mission is to “protect free expression in the US and worldwide.” If PEN America cannot protect free expression in its own offices or at its own events, how can the organization be trusted to do so anywhere else?

As an organization that “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights,” PEN America’s dishonest coverage of the genocide of Palestinians and their consistent platforming of Zionists has invalidated its implicit contract with the writers they purport to represent: the agreement to protect their freedoms and securities. We are being lied to by an organization that has built its reputation off the labor of writers it refuses to protect.  

PEN America’s silence and implicit support of Israel stands in stark contrast to the actions of PEN International and PEN Centers around the world. Nearly fifty PEN Centers signed onto PEN International’s ceasefire call in October. English PEN, in tandem with Irish PEN and Wales PEN Cymru, have been vocally critical of the UK government’s uncritical support for Israel, have called for investigations into the sale of arms to Israel, and have demanded political pressure for Israel to comply with international law. PEN America, by contrast, has had no criticism of American complicity in the bombardment of Gaza. Likewise, a recent letter from PEN South Africa to its members outlines several concrete actions taken by that organization, many of them in support of and following the lead of PEN International. It also includes a summary of a call-out sent to PEN America, asking, among other things, why the US chapter has been so circumspect in condemning Israel’s murders, and why it had not yet joined PEN International’s call for a ceasefire. 

After increasingly loud public protests as well as internal pressure by rank and file, PEN America finally joined the call for a ceasefire on March 20th, five months after many of its sister centers, but they deserve no amount of adulation for acquiescing to the bare minimum demand that so many have been pressing for. As PEN South Africa writes, “because of the United States’ military, economic and political relationship with Israel, PEN America bears a particular responsibility [...] to call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire and an end to the occupation.” We believe that cultural and human rights organizations have a crucial role to play standing in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for freedom, especially here in the United States.  

This goes well beyond CEO Suzanne Nossel (whose longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East are well-documented) or any one individual. PEN America has a long history of ignoring PEN International and the global network of PEN organizations, focusing on narrow US interests instead of the global solidarity meant to underpin the organizations’ work. Therefore, we demand the immediate resignation of PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan, and the entire PEN America Executive Committee, whose values and commitments have steered the organization in a disastrous direction for far too long. We likewise join the demands made by the authors who pulled out from the PEN World Voices Festival, asking for an audit of PEN America’s longstanding implicit support of the Israeli occupation. We stand in solidarity with PEN staff and the membership of PEN America United. We demand new, elected leadership who will agree to paying staff a living wage and to working in concert with PEN International.

It should be noted that many of the undersigned writers, many of whom are early in their careers and rely on prize money to fund their basic needs, understand the risks we are taking by rejecting an organization that holds a cultural monopoly within the literary community. 

Writers have a responsibility to be good stewards of history in order to be good stewards of our communities. Such stewardship requires, in the words of Toni Morrison, that we “look to the present to contour the past.” It requires that we have an authentic relationship to knowledge, which we apply to our analysis of how the present should function in light of the past. As an organization that benefits from, and seeks to support the labor of writers, PEN America should expect to be held to the same standard of stewardship. 

We cannot, in good faith, align with an organization that has shown such blatant disregard of our collective values. We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine. We refuse to be honored by an organization that acts as a cultural front for American exceptionalism. We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars. And we refuse to take part in anything that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide. 

Declining Signatories

Camonghne Felix, PEN/Jean Stein 

Christina Sharpe, PEN/Jean Stein 

Kelly X. Hui, PEN/Dau Prize

Eugenia Leigh, PEN/Voelcker Award 

Maggie Millner, PEN/Voelcker Award

Esther Allen, PEN/Manheim Award 

Julia Sanches, PEN Translation Prize

Frank Garrett, PEN Translation Prize

Don Mee Choi, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Kira Josefsson, PEN Translation Prize 

Maya Binyam, PEN/Jean Stein, PEN/Hemingway Award

Alejandro Varela, PEN/Jean Stein 

Robin Myers, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Cleo Qian, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize

Natascha Bruce, PEN Translation Prize 

Nick Mandernach, PEN/Dau Prize

Joseph Earl Thomas, PEN/Jean Stein 

J.D. Pluecker, PEN Translation Prize

Adrian Minckley, PEN Translation Prize

Ada Zhang, PEN/Bingham Award 

James Frankie Thomas, PEN/Hemingway Award

Signatories of Support

PEN America’s recent donation of $100,000 to the PEN Emergency Fund pales in comparison to CEO Suzanne Nossel’s annual salary of more than $450,000 and the organization’s net assets of $43 million. This letter’s signatories of support object to the parsimony of this gesture in the midst of an ongoing genocide. Signatories of support who are able to do so pledge to redistribute their prize winnings to mutual aid funds in Gaza.

Soje, PEN/Heim Translation 

Noel Quiñones, PEN/Dau Prize

Subhashree Beeman, PEN/Heim Translation

Meg Arenberg, PEN/Heim Translation

Zkara Gaillard, PEN/Dau Prize

Sarina Ramos Rubén, PEN/Heim Translation

Verónica Dávila De Jesús, PEN/Heim Translation

Asa Yoneda, PEN Translation Prize 

Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, PEN Translation Prize