The PEN America World Voices Festival is the premier celebration of writing from the United States and around the world.
Schedule of Events:
6:30 PM – 7:45 PM: Confronting the Powerful at Joe’s Pub
Journalists take extreme risks to publish stories exposing corruption, fraud, and the atrocities of war. Often putting their lives on the line, these writers wield the strength of the written word to defend truth and democracy from the manipulations of the powerful. Featuring New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here), Patrick Radden Keefe (Rogues), and Patricia Evangelista (Some People Need Killing), in conversation with moderator and The Atlantic staff writer George Packer, the talk will focus on these journalists’ experiences challenging those in power, and how they managed the threats that followed.
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8:00 PM – 9:15 PM: Breaking the Novel at Church of the Village
In the mid-20th Century, postmodernism stretched what the novel could do and the stories it could tell; works became self-referential, featured unreliable narrators, and questioned ideas of time and perspective. Exploring how style and form can break open reality, this panel brings together authors whose contemporary works reimagine the possibilities of the novel and reframe our understandings of how we live. How do formal innovations change the tenor of a story? Novelists Jenny Egan (The Candy House), Maurice Carlos Ruffin (American Daughters), and Geetanjali Shree (Tomb of Sand), come together with moderator and novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee (Hurt You) to discuss reimagining the possibilities of the novel.
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