Awards presented by the PEN American Center (today PEN America) that are no longer active.
The awards are among many PEN awards sponsored by International PEN in over 145 PEN centres around the world. The PEN American Center awards have been characterized as being among the "major" American literary prizes. [1]
The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award [2] was an award that honored writers anywhere in the world who have fought courageously in the face of adversity for the right to freedom of expression. [3] Established in 1987, the award was administered by PEN American Center and underwritten by PEN trustee Barbara Goldsmith. The last award was in 2015; its successor is PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, established in 2016 and honoring writers who were imprisoned for their work.
The PEN/Steven Kroll Award [11] was awarded by the PEN American Center "to acknowledge the distinct literary contributions of picture book writers." [12] Established in memory of Steven Kroll, a former PEN Trustee and Chair of PEN's Children's/Young Adult Book Authors Committee, this honor was awarded for the first time in 2012 for a book published in 2011. [13] [14] The last award was given in 2014.
Year | Author | Title | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
2012 | Patricia C. McKissack | Never Forgotten | |
2013 | Michelle Markel | The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau | [15] |
2014 | Bil Lepp | The King of Little Things | [16] [17] |
The PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career was awarded by the PEN American Center to honor a promising writer who has published three works of fiction. [18]
Year | Author | Ref. |
---|---|---|
2010 | Susan Choi | [19] |
2011 | Aleksander Hemon | [20] |
The PEN Emerging Writers Awards was awarded by the PEN American Center. It was awarded to up-and-coming authors whose writing had been featured in distinguished literary journals, but had not published book-length works. [21] Three prizes were awarded: one fiction, one nonfiction, and one poetry. Candidates were nominated only by editors from print and online journals. Participating journals for 2011 included: 6 x 6, A Public Space, Bloom, Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fence, Gargoyle, Glimmer Train, Guernica, Harvard Review, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, New York Quarterly, One Story, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, Spinning Jenny, and Tin House.
Year | Category | Author | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
2011 | Fiction | Adam Day | [22] |
Poetry | Smith Henderson | [22] | |
Nonfiction | David Stuart McLean | [22] |
The PEN/Amazon.com Short Story Award was given to unpublished writers who submit original short story manuscripts. Each manuscript competed for a $10,000 cash grant and publication at Amazon.com and in The Boston Book Review. Award was active for one year. [23] [24]
The Architectural Digest Award for Literary Writing on the Visual Arts was presented for literary writing on the visual arts. [25] [26] It was active two years 2000–2001.
The Gregory Kolovakos Award [27] was a literary award given every three years by PEN American Center to a U.S. literary translator, editor, or critic "whose work, in meeting the challenge of cultural difference, extends Gregory Kolovakos's commitment to the richness of Hispanic literature and to expanding its English-language audience". It was primarily intended to recognize translations into English from Spanish, but translations from other Hispanic languages were also eligible. Gregory Kolovakos was a graduate of Yale University and served as the director of the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts for many years. He was also the founding executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in 1985. The monetary amount of the Award was USD $2000. The prize was first given in 1992.
Year | Author |
---|---|
1992 | Eliot Weinberger |
1998 | Johannes Wilbert |
2001 | Gregory Rabassa |
Alastair Reid | |
2004 | Cola Franzen |
Robert M. Laughlin | |
Alexander Taylor |
The Jerard Fund Award honored a work in progress of general nonfiction distinguished by high literary quality by a woman at the midpoint in her career. Presented every 2 years, it was active from 2001 to 2005. [28]
The Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir was presented for a first published memoir. It was active from 1998 to 2006. [29]
The Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction was presented for an American author's first-published book of general nonfiction. It was active from 1989 to 2006. [30]
The PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award was an award presented annually from 1993 to 2006 to a U.S. resident who "fought courageously, despite adversity, to safeguard the First Amendment right to freedom of expression as it applies to the written word." [31] Sponsored by PEN American Center and Newman's Own, a cash prize of $20,000 was awarded. It was active from 1993 to 2006.
Year | Author | Description | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
1993 | Claudia Johnson | Restored literary classics—including Steinbeck, Chaucer, and Aristophanes—that had been banned from Florida classrooms; defended student production of A Raisin in the Sun . Patricia Lightweis fought targeted obscenity charges brought against her for books and magazines carried at her store in South Carolina. | |
1994 | Carole Marlowe | Arizona drama teacher who resisted district censorship of a play selected for student production. | |
1995 | Joyce Meskis | Denver bookstore owner who successfully challenged a Colorado law barring stores open to children from selling novels and art books with sexual content, and who continued to sell Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1989, donating 25% of proceeds to anticensorship organizations. | |
1996 | Cissy Lacks | Missouri high school Creative Writing teacher fired for "failure to censor her students' creative expression." | |
1997 | Nancy Hsu Fleming | Defeated a corporation's attempt to silence her written concerns about possible groundwater contamination caused by a local landfill. | |
1998 | Terrilyn Simpson | Maine writer and journalist harassed for her attempts to cover local industrial health hazards. | |
1999 | Releah Lent | Florida high school teacher and student newspaper advisor who has struggled to defend literature in the classroom and press freedom for students. | |
2000 | William Holda | President, Kilgore College, who defended the production of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America in Kilgore, Texas. | |
2001 | Deloris Wilson | High school librarian in West Monroe, Louisiana who fought to preserve access to library materials banned for sexual content. | [32] |
Alberto Sarrain | Cuban-émigré theater producer who challenged Miami-Dade County's ban on public funding to arts organizations performing work by artists currently living in Cuba. | [32] | |
2002 | Vanessa Leggett | Freelance writer who was jailed in a federal detention center in Texas for 168 days for refusing to bow to a sweeping subpoena of confidential source materials. | |
2003 | Jerilynn Adams Williams | Texas librarian who successfully turned back an attempt to remove books from circulation at Montgomery County public libraries. | |
2004 | Barbara Parsons Lane | One of eight incarcerated writers who were sued by the State of Connecticut after contributing to Couldn't Keep It To Myself: Testimonies from our Imprisoned Sisters, a moving anthology of stories and essays by women who participated in a creative writing workshop led by Wally Lamb at York Correctional Institute. | |
2005 | Joan Airoldi | Librarian and library director in rural Washington state who challenged an FBI effort to search patron records under the Library Awareness Program. | [33] |
2006 | Sibel Edmonds | Translator who was fired from her job at the FBI after complaining of intelligence failures and poor performance in her unit. |
The PEN/Katherine Anne Porter First Amendment Award was presented for only one year. It was meant to given to a U.S. resident "who has fought courageously, despite adversity, to safeguard the First Amendment right to freedom of expression as it applies to the written word." [34] Sponsored by PEN American Center and Katherine Anne Porter Foundation, the award included a cash prize of US$10,000. The award succeeded the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award which was last awarded in 2006. The award was given in 2008 only.
Year | Author | Description | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
2008 | Laura Berg | Psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital who faced an investigation into possible charges of sedition when she wrote a letter to the editor of her local newspaper which was critical of George W. Bush. | [35] |
The Renato Poggioli Translation Award was for a translator at work on an English-language version of Italian literature. Active from 1991 to c. 2000. [36]
The Roger Klein Award for Career Achievement was presented to a trade book editor every two years for "distinguished editorial achievement." It was active from 1971 to c. 2000. [37] |To a trade book editor every two years for "distinguished editorial achievement." [38]
The Roger Klein Award for Editing was an honor "given [every two years] to an outstanding editor in trade hardcover publishing." [39] It was active from 1971 to c. 2000. [40]
Gregory Rabassa was an American literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English. He taught for many years at Columbia University and Queens College. Rabassa was ordered for Commander of the Order of Merit in 2011.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
PEN America, founded in 1922, and headquartered in New York City, is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of literature and human rights. PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 PEN centers worldwide that together compose PEN International. PEN America has offices in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and since late 2023 also in Florida.
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021).
Anna Funder is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, the novella The Girl With the Dogs and Wifedom.
David Quammen is an American writer focusing on science, nature, and travel. He is the author of fifteen books. Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Deyda Hydara was a co-founder and primary editor of The Point, a major independent Gambian newspaper. He was also a correspondent for both AFP News Agency and Reporters Without Borders for more than 30 years. Hydara also worked as a Radio presenter in the Gambia called Radio Syd during his early years as a freelance journalist.
Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
Marie Arana is a Peruvian author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.
Barbara Goldsmith was an American author, journalist, and philanthropist. She received critical and popular acclaim for her best-selling books, essays, articles, and her philanthropic work. She was awarded four honoris causa doctorates, and numerous awards; been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Presidential Commissions, and the New York State Council on the Arts; and honored by The New York Public Library Literary Lions as well as the Literacy Volunteers, the American Academy in Rome, The Authors Guild, and the Guild Hall Academy of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, she received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal from the Republic of Poland. In November 2008, Goldsmith sus elected a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. She has three children and six grandchildren. The Financial Times declared that "Goldsmith is leaving a legacy—one of art, literature, friends, family and philanthropy."
Eileen Welsome is an American journalist and author. She received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1994 while a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune for a 3-part story titled "The Plutonium Experiment" published beginning on November 15, 1993. She was awarded the prize for her articles about the government's human radiation experiments conducted on unwilling and unknowing Americans during the Cold War. Welsome also has received a George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Gold Medal, the Heywood Broun Award, as well as awards from the National Headliners Association and the Associated Press. In 1999, Welsome wrote the book The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. In 2000, Welsome received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and the PEN Center USA West Award in Research Nonfiction for The Plutonium Files.
PEN Center USA was a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. It was one of two PEN International Centers in the United States, the other being the PEN America in New York City. On March 1, 2018, PEN Center USA unified under the PEN America umbrella as the PEN America Los Angeles office. PEN Center USA was founded in 1943 and incorporated as a nonprofit association in 1981. Much of PEN Center USA's programming continues out of the PEN America Los Angeles office, including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, PEN In the Community writing residencies and guest speaker program, and the PEN Presents conversation series.
The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction is awarded by PEN America biennially "to a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective and illuminating important contemporary issues which have been published in the United States during the previous two calendar years. It is intended that the winning book possess the qualities of intellectual rigor, perspicuity of expression, and stylistic elegance conspicuous in the writings of author and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose four dozen books and countless other publications continue to provide an important and incisive commentary on the American social, intellectual and political scene."
The PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing was awarded by the PEN America to honor "a nonfiction book about sports." The award was established in 2010 and is awarded to a title that is "biographical, investigative, historical, or analytical" in nature. Judges have included Robert Lipsyte, Tim O'Brien, and Susan Orlean. In June 2019 ESPN announced it would no longer partner with PEN. The awards have not been rebooted by PEN as of April 2021.
Ogaga Ifowodo is a Nigerian lawyer, scholar, poet, columnist/public commentator and human rights activist. He was awarded the 1998 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, given to writers "anywhere in the world who have fought courageously in the face of adversity for the right to freedom of expression.
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