Following the cancellation of PEN America’s annual literary awards ceremony as well as its World Voices Festival, acclaimed poet Monica Youn joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about political protests and literary prizes.
Youn recounts the sequence of events that led her and eight other finalists for PEN’s $75,000 Jean Stein Book Award—as well as a number of nominees in other categories—to withdraw their work from consideration in protest of PEN’s position on Gaza. She explains how PEN’s efforts regarding Gaza and Palestine have failed to match its advocacy for writers in danger in other places, like Ukraine, and discusses whether the organization is living up to its mission to protect free expression. She also describes the situation for student protesters on her own campus, the University of California, Irvine.
Youn reads from her most recent collection, . MEGAPHONE EMBED We have you here to talk about prizes and protest. And your most recent collection of poetry, , as Whitney mentioned, came out last year, and it was on the long list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award.
Both of those prizes are given by PEN America which, as many of our listeners probably already know, is a writers’ organization. On its website, they describe themselves as, “Standing at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” PEN America, in particular, is one of the lar.