The PEN Pod

It's Friday, which means it's time for our weekly Tough Questions segment with PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel. We discuss the First Amendment implications of the showdowns in Portland, Michael Cohen's return to prison, and Suzanne's new book, DARE TO SPEAK, publishing Tuesday.

On today's edition, we speak with poet and writer Jaswinder Bolina, whose new essay collection OF COLOR just published this summer. He talks about how the text does and doesn't respond to our current moment of racial reckoning, and he offers his guidance for how to put pen to paper.

The entertainment industry is searching for ways out of the lockdown—while it also reckons with systemic racial inequalities. The Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters walks us through just how Hollywood is changing for writers and creative professionals, and what might happen when we emerge from the pandemic.

How has the far-right movement attracted so many people, in particular women? Reporter Seyward Darby has been documenting how three such individuals came to occupy positions of power within the hate movement in America. We talk about her new book SISTERS IN HATE: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism. Plus, unidentified federal agents swooping in on the streets of Portland.

On this edition of The PEN Pod, we kick off our series of conversations with our Emerging Voices fellows and their mentors, starting with M. Kiguwa and her mentor Antonia Crane. They talk about how mentorship has changed amid the pandemic and what the next generation of writers might bring to the table.

On this Friday edition of The PEN Pod, we put our toughest questions about free speech to PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, author of the forthcoming book DARE TO SPEAK: DEFENDING FREE SPEECH FOR ALL. We discuss The New York Times' writer Bari Weiss, the renewed hostility of White House press briefings, and the looming threat of election-related disinformation. 

On this edition of The PEN Pod, we talk to author Leïla Slimani about her first non-fiction work, Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World. She profiles women who share with her the balance between their public and private lives, and discusses prospects for change when it comes to women and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa. Plus, we preview two new reading lists now available at PEN.org.

On today's edition, we bring you a roundtable conversation with the leaders of the Black committee of writers at the Writers Guild of America West. We discuss how the pipeline for Black talent in Hollywood is broken, ensuring that writers of color are being paid to tell their own stories, and how the major Hollywood players need to do more than just lip service to serve racial justice.

On this episode, PEN America's Gina Chung talks with author Sejal Shah, whose new memoir This Is One Way To Dance: Essays on Race, Place, & Belonging published this June. They discuss how the collection is meant to defy stereotypes and reshape narratives about South Asian identity in the U.S.

On today's edition of The PEN Pod, we speak with poet Roy G. Guzmán about their debut collection of poems, Catrachos. They call it something like a Bildungsroman, a collection that reflects queer identity and resilience.