The PEN America World Voices Festival is the premier celebration of writing from the United States and around the world.

Schedule of Events:

10:00 AM – 6:00 PM: ArtLords Public Mural – Day 2 at Astor Place
ArtLords, together with the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) and the vibrant community of New York City, will ignite the PEN World Voices Festival with an electrifying live mural creation event. This groundbreaking artistic endeavor is poised to magnify the transformative power of art in championing social change, advocating for freedom of expression, and fortifying cultural resilience.

The mural will be a canvas of solidarity, embodying the resilient spirit of artists who defy adversity to express their truth. It will intricately interlace narratives of struggle and victory from across the globe, paying homage to those navigating conflict zones or enduring oppressive censorship.

In an inclusive gesture, the community at large is warmly invited to contribute to this monumental canvas of freedom and unity—art materials will be readily provided. Come, join us in painting a vibrant testament to the indomitable spirit of artistic freedom and collective solidarity.
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12:00 PM – 1:15 PM: Weight of History at Judson Memorial Church – Memorial Hall
Across her career, Pulitzer Prize winner and former United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove’s poetry has looked back through history. Overlaid with imagination, memory, and emotion, Dove’s historical poems bring forth perennial questions of morality and belonging. In her newest collection, her first in twelve years, Playlist for the Apocalypse, Rita Dove continues investigating the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. In conversation with author & historian Farah Jasmine Griffin, the two will discuss Rita’s newest collection, the weight of American history, and how African American poets and writers grapple with that weight in their work.
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12:00 PM – 2:30 PM: Reading Rhythms at Project Farmhouse
Since last year, Reading Rhythms parties, events at which strangers get together to read and talk about books, have been taking the city by storm. Started by a group of friends on a rooftop to combat loneliness and the lack of spaces to come together after the pandemic, the company now hosts up to six sold out events a week all over the city. The World Voices Festival is proud to present a Reading Rhythms party as part of this year’s programming, providing the perfect opportunity for our audience to dig into Festival authors’ books and trade recommendations with other book lovers. Bring your favorite book and settle in with friends for a reading party! at Reading Rhythms
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12:30 PM – 1:45 PM: Translation Slam at The Center
The Translation Slam puts different translations of the same text side by side and invites the translators, authors, and audience members to join in a lively critical debate of how each version meets its creative challenges. New texts, previously untranslated into English, will be provided by authors Jenny Erpenbeck (Kairos) and Tahir Hamut Igzil (Waiting to Be Arrested at Night). Translating Erpenbeck’s work from German will be Geoffrey Howes and Ross Benjamin. Translating Igzil’s work from Uyghur will be Gulnigar Baham. Translations will vie for audience approval and the event will end with a brief Q&A. Hosting the Slam will be PEN America Translation Committee member, Elizabeth Lowe.
This is a free event, but registration is required.
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12:30 PM – 1:45 PM: Generations: What We Inherit at AIA Center for Architecture – Tafel Hall
Wisdom, trauma, wealth, and traditions can all be inherited across generations: pieces of the familial pasts preserved and carried into a morphing present. Shifting societal norms create tension with these vestiges, and seismic historical events lead to profound cultural and familial changes over generations. Featuring acclaimed novelists Ayana Mathis (The Unsettled), Anne Enright (The Wren, The Wren), and moderator Asako Serizawa (Inheritors), this discussion will explore these generational complexities and the impacts of inheritance.
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12:30 PM – 1:45 PM: Writing the Self Through Others at Church of the Village
Though memoir is an art of self-analysis, telling a personal story often involves writing about the significant relationships that have helped shape that self. How do nonfiction authors navigate the tricky terrain of writing people in their lives? How can you faithfully and ethically represent deeply personal topics—including loss, intimacy, struggling against institutions, and fraught familial bonds—that by definition involve other people? Acclaimed writers Tara Westover (Educated), Margo Jefferson (Constructing a Nervous System), and Joyce Carol Oates (Letters to a Biographer) come together to talk about their strategies for dealing with these essential questions of the writing life.
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1:00 PM – 2:15 PM: Writing Humor for Kids, Seriously at Deutsches Haus at NYU
Funny books for kids can transport young readers to an amusing and entertaining universe, serving as a refuge from life’s difficult moments, as well as easing the approach to serious subjects. A panel of four distinctive voices in contemporary children’s literature—Crystal Allen (Between Two Brothers) Nick Bruel (Bad Kitty series), Christopher Paul Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy) and Eugene Yelchin (The Genius Under the Table)—will discuss the role of humor in their books. Their work explores, respectively, using humor as a catalyst for the major themes of love, hope and forgiveness in families, a cranky cat’s zany adventures, Black American lives in various historical eras, and growing up behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. The panelists will delve into how humor infuses their stories and the challenge of using humor responsibly and with sensitivity. The panel will be moderated by Elizabeth Levy, longtime author of humorous fiction whose recent non-fiction historical books have been singled out for their unexpectedly funny qualities. Her most recent book is Witch Hunt: The Cold War, Joe McCarthy, and the Red Scare.
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3:00 PM – 4:15 PM: World-Building: The Marriage of the Fantastical and Familiar at Church of the Village
Science fiction and fantasy writing is a delicate balance of the familiar and the fantastical. Whether authors’ parallel universes subtly diverge from our own, introduce an extra layer of possibility to established myths or past or future events, or unfold entirely unique landscapes, their creators must consider what to retain from our world and what to reshape. In this panel, award-winning writers Leigh Bardugo (The Familiar), R. F. Kuang (Babel, Yellowface), and Nnedi Okorafor (Like Thunder, Shadow Speaker) speak with Hugo Award winning editor Ruoxi Chen about what goes into building and transporting readers to uncharted territories of the imagination.
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3:00 PM – 4:15 PM: Waiting to Be Arrested At Night: Tahir Hamut Izgil with Sam Sussman at AIA Center for Architecture – Tafel Hall|
Uyghur poet and filmmaker Tahir Hamut Izgil discusses his powerful new memoir Waiting to be Arrested at Night, the true story of the Chinese government’s brutal persecution of the Uyghur people. A book that “unfolds like a classic horror movie as relative normalcy dissolves into a nightmare,” (The New York Times) it traces the political, social, and cultural destruction of Izgil’s homeland. In conversation with writer Sam Sussman, Izgil will speak about the vanishing of Uyghur rights, culture, and people in China.
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4:00 PM – 5:15 PM: “Soul Child”: A Parent’s Legacy at Joe’s Pub
The examples a parent sets—lessons both said and unsaid—can cast a long shadow, informing their children’s visions of history, art, literature, and self, among much else. Vigdis Hjorth’s “precise and affecting” Is Mother Dead? “deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict” (The New York Times). In Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Like A Sky Inside, an overnight stay in the Louvre provokes the narrator to recollect her childhood visits to the museum with her father. In Amitava Kumar’s “deeply human” (The New Yorker) My Beloved Life, a man’s life is recounted first in the third person and then through the specificity of his daughter’s recollection after his death. The three authors join to discuss their books that wrestle with a parent’s lasting influence, in memory and in life.
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5:00 PM – 6:15 PM: The Plague Novel – Before and After the Pandemic at Judson Memorial Church – Memorial Hall
By heightening narrative stakes to the absolute world-encompassing max,** **apocalyptic storytelling can lucidly reveal the forces that shape our society—and make it vulnerable to various forms of collapse. After the recent (and ongoing) upheavals of COVID-19, it’s impossible not to read the genre differently. This panel brings together novelists who published books about global devastation both before and after the pandemic, from stories that seemed curiously to predict it, to those that offer explicit commentary on the ways it changed our lives. Join novelists Gary Shteyngart (Our Country Friends), Waubgeshig Rice (Moon of the Turning Leaves), Peng Shepherd (The Book of M), and moderator Weike Wang (Joan is Okay) to discuss the evolving, bizarre, and culturally specific ways we tell the story of the end of the world.
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6:30 PM – 7:45 PM: Shedding Light: Memoirs of Love, Loss, and Mental Illness at Joe’s Pub
Join acclaimed authors Blake Butler and Jonathan Rosen for a thought-provoking conversation delving into their latest memoirs. Blake Butler, author of “Molly,” and Jonathan Rosen, author of “The Best Minds,” have each crafted powerful narratives exploring themes of love, loss, and the difficulties of supporting a loved one with mental illness. In “Molly,” Butler navigates the complexity of grief surrounding the suicide of his wife, who struggled with mental health challenges. Rosen’s “The Best Minds” traces the mirroring life paths he and a childhood friend take, until the childhood friend who has schizophrenia, murders his girlfriend and is institutionalized. Through their poignant prose, Butler and Rosen offer readers a glimpse into the human condition, illuminating the profound impact that our loved ones can have on our lives. Join us for an engaging discussion led by moderator and _New York Times _bestselling author, Susan Shapiro, as Butler and Rosen explore their respective journeys of compassion, understanding, and the enduring power of literature to shed light on the darkest corners of the human experience.
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