90th Anniversary

Case Histories: Wole Soyinka

April 16, 2012 | PEN American

“Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.”

                                                   —Wole Soyinka

Defending writers and advocating for free expression both at home and abroad has been a linchpin of PEN American Center since its founding in 1922. PEN American Center members often voiced their concerns in speeches, in diplomatic pressure, or in letters of support for persecuted writers and colleagues facing exile, imprisonment, torture, or execution for exercising their right to free expression. As we celebrate our 90th anniversary, we’ll look back at emblematic free expression cases that trace the evolution and growing importance of our work.

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian writer whose prolific career includes more than 20 publications of plays, novels, and poetry. In 1986, he was the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Last year, Soyinka delivered PEN’s Sixth Annual Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. With this speech, he offered a thoughtful examination of censorship—and a writer’s purpose in a climate of forced silence and intolerance. No stranger to censorship himself, Soyinka helped launch PEN’s innagural World Voices Festival with the event Banned Voices, in which he read from the work of Tahar Djaout, the accomplished Algerian writer who was murdered in 1993.
We continue our 90th anniversary celebration with the details of Wole Soyinka’s inspiring life.

Wole Soyinka © 2011 Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 in Nigeria. He studied at University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in the UK, graduating in 1957 before working for the Royal Court Theatre in London. A year later he wrote The Lion and the Jewell.
In 1960 he was awarded a Rockefeller Research Fellowship and returned to Nigeria where he established an amateur acting company, the Nineteen-Sixty Masks. Wole Soyinka continued to write essays about current affairs and Nigerian politics and his novel The Interpreter was published in 1964.
The following year Soyinka was arrested after taking over a radio station at gunpoint and broadcasting a message denouncing electoral fraud in Western Nigeria. His detention sparked international protests, and the next year he was acquitted on a technicality.
In 1966 there were two military coups and Nigeria appeared to be heading for a civil war after Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared south-east Nigeria to be the independent Republic of Biafra. The following year Soyinka attempted to negotiate between the federal government and the Biafra separatists. This resulted in his arrest, accused of siding with the rebels.
In 1969 the civil war ended and Soyinka was released under an amnesty which followed. His experiences as a prisoner were chronicled in his book The Man Died: Prison Notes. After his release he left Nigeria for six years before returning and then in 1983 went into exile again. The following year, The Man Died: Prison Notes was banned in Nigeria.
In 1986 Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; the first African writer to win the prize. He returned to Nigeria once again and continued to write plays and essays; however, in 1994 yet again he was forced to flee Nigeria and go into exile. In 1997 he was charged in absentia with treason by the regime of General Sani Abacha. These charges were lifted following Abacha’s death in 1998.

 Soyinka continues to live and work in both Nigeria and California.

90th Anniversary

Mayor Bloomberg Declares Next Week PEN American Center Week

April 27, 2012 | PEN American

WHEREAS:
The literary arts have always been a crucial part of New York’s cultural life. Our city is home to a thriving publishing industry, and just this past week, we hosted the first-ever New York City literary honors in recognition of accomplished writers for whom New York has been a consistent source of inspiration. We’re always pleased to recognize the work of individuals and organizations who commit themselves to the improvement of society and the advancement of the arts, and that’s why we’re glad to join the PEN American Center as they celebrate the organization’s 90th anniversary.
WHEREAS:
For the past nine decades, PEN has been an international advocate of freedom of expression and the support of literature. Of the 140 branches the organization has established around the world, the PEN American Center is teh most active and vibrant, providing community and fellowship to the writers who constitute its membership. We’re glad that this organization calls New York City its home, and are pleased to join these literary leaders in celebrating such a distinguished legacy of advocacy.
WHEREAS:
This year, the PEN American Center honors Ethiopian Journalist Eskinder Nega with the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. PEN’s Freedom to Write Program recognizes imprisoned, persecuted, or supressed writers whose work demonstrates a commitment to freedom. New Yorkers are world-renowned for their creative and open-minded spirit, and it’s only fitting that an organization so dedicated to preserving and perpetuating these values both here and abroad is based in our city. Together, we can look forward to a society that values the literary arts and personal freedoms in equal measure.
Now therefore, I , Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York, in recognition of this important event, do hereby proclaim April 30th-May 6th, 2012 in the City of New York as: “PEN American Center Week.”

90th Anniversary

The 1920s: PEN’s Founding and Early Years

March 6, 2012 | PEN American

Throughout the year, we’ll be celebrating PEN’s 90th anniversary by looking at the key events, cases, and characters from the organization’s history. As part of our online retrospective, we’ll be placing those benchmark moments in a monthly series of interactive timelines, broken down by decade. First up: the ’20s and the founding of both PEN International and PEN American Center.

PEN Club dinner photo sent to Sinclair Lewis

1921
Founding of International PEN Club
Catharine Amy Dawson-Scott, a British poet, playwright, and peace activist, founds the International PEN Club (poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists) to foster international literary fellowship among writers that would transcend the ethnic and national divides that contributed to World War I and endured after the war’s end.

Guests at Dawson-Scott’s first PEN Club dinner party in London included John Masefield, Arnold Bennet, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, and PEN’s first president, John Galsworthy, who spoke of an international literary movement that could serve as a “League of Nations for Men and Women of Letters.”

1922
Global Intentions
Soon PEN clubs are established in Paris, Beijing, and other culture capitals of the world. Dinner gatherings provide the free forum where writers can share ideas irrespective of their culture, language, or political standing.
John Galsworthy approaches Kate Douglas Wiggin and Joseph Anthony, an American writer and Managing Editor of Century magazine, to start an American PEN Club in New York City. Anthony, living in London at the time, writes to Alexander Black and Maxwell Aley asking that they organize the club.
American PEN Club Founded
The American PEN Club holds its first meeting for 40 members at the Coffee Club House in New York City. Among the first members are Booth Tarkington (the first President), Robert Benchley, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Walter Lippmann, Eugene O’Neil, Robert Frost, Sidney Howard, Willa Cather, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Joseph Anthony, and Alexander Black.

1923
A Question of Politics
International PEN holds its first international Congress in London bringing together writers from 11 Centers. Attendees envision an international organization standing for free expression, peace, and friendship, that rises above the fray of national politics.
Money Talks
International PEN asks American PEN to host the second international Congress in New York City. Unable to raise the money necessary to pay for the gathering, American PEN asks members to begin paying dues. Initial cost of annual membership: $5.

1926
International PEN Congress in Berlin
PEN’s fourth international Congress is held in Berlin, the first such international gathering hosted in Germany since the end of WWI. In a meeting with Galsworthy, several young German writers, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Robert Musil among others express concern that the German PEN Center did not represent the true face of German literature. Playwright Ernst Toller insists that PEN can not ignore politics, saying, “it is everywhere and influences everything.”

Galsworthy presents three resolutions that form the foundation of PEN’s future charter:

1. Literature, national though it should be in origin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency between nations in spite of political or international upheavals.

2. In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.

3. Members of the PEN will at all times use what influence they have in favor of good understanding and mutual respect between nations.

1927
Lost in Translation
At the PEN International Congress in Brussels, Henry Seidel Canby, the American PEN president, presents his idea of an “international clearing house” for translation to “make more efficient the flow of literary expression across language frontiers.” While the idea is enthusiastically received, funding and organization fall short.
 Source : PEN American Center

Executive Director Steven Isenberg to Leave PEN at the Close of 2012‏

Executive Director Steven Isenberg to Leave PEN at the Close of 2012‏

Dear Friends, Steven L. Isenberg, who has served as executive director of PEN American Center since 2009, announced today in a letter to PEN’s president and Board of Trustees that he will end his tenure at the close of 2012. “I wish to inform the Board that I will be leaving at the end of this year. I write to you now to give ample time for the search for my successor and to ensure a smooth, effective transition. By year’s end, PEN American Center will have finished celebrating its 90th anniversary, and I will be 72. Taking that together with the strength of our accomplishments, the course that we have set, and our staff’s readiness for the future, I am confident that my decision is right not only for me, but also for PEN. We can look back over these last three years with great satisfaction, especially in how we met the times with energy and resolve.” The letter in its entirety can be found here. In response to Steve’s announcement, PEN President Peter Godwin said: “Steve has been an extraordinary executive director of PEN American Center. Under his watch, over the last three years, the workings of the organization have been streamlined and modernized. I think he leaves PEN in a much better state for all this. Steve’s commitment to our core values of freedom of expression has been steadfast. His energy is infectious and his love of literature shines through everything he does. His experience and wisdom in matters administrative have been crucial to the way we work. He has helped me enormously in my first few months as president of PEN, and I know he will continue to do so for the rest of the year, until his very last day. PEN has been very fortunate to have him. The Board will take up planning a search for Steve’s successor when we meet next week.” Former PEN President Anthony Appiah said:  “Steven Isenberg arrived when PEN was under incredibly difficult financial circumstances and has brought us through to new levels of achievement with many new sources of funding. He has established us in the world of the great foundations—Mellon, Ford, Open Society Foundations and Carnegie, and given us the credibility to develop our relationships with them and with their peers. Time and again he has spoken for us, here and abroad, with just the right tone. He will be leaving an office of talented people, a good number of whom he has hired, and all of whom he has helped to work together congenially as an effective team. And, speaking as the last president, I can say that he has worked wonderfully well with PEN’s leadership to chart our path through challenging times. In short, Steve Isenberg has been a terrific executive director, and he will be sorely missed. We are grateful for all his fine work and I would like personally to wish him all the best in his new life after PEN.”   PEN American Center | 588 Broadway, Suite 303 | New York, NY 10012 | (212) 334-1660

 Steven L. Isenberg: Executive Director, PEN American Center

Steven L. Isenberg is Executive Director of the PEN American Center, the largest chapter of International PEN, the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization. He has been a university overseer and media executive, and has held important posts in journalism, government, law, and academia. He was publisher of New York Newsday, The Stamford Advocate, Greenwich Time, and the Executive Vice President of The Los Angeles Times. He served since 2003 on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect the Journalists (CPJ) and became an advisory board member in February 2008.
Isenberg is now Chairman of the Board Emeritus of Adelphi University on Long Island, New York, where he was initially appointed by the New York State Regents as interim chair of a new Board and was later elected as chairman and President ad interim.
He taught for several years at the University of Texas at Austin as a visiting professor of the humanities in the liberal arts honors program; at the University of California-Berkeley as a visiting professor of English and journalism; visiting lecturer at Yale; the James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy at Davidson College; and visiting scholar in media studies at The New School University and Polytechnic in New York. He is also an honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University, England, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Adelphi University.
Prior to working in newspapers, Isenberg had been chief of staff to New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and a litigator at the firm of Breed, Abbott and Morgan. He served as president of the executive advisory board of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley.
Isenberg obtained his undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962; a second bachelor's degree and a master's degree (also in English Literature) from Worcester College, Oxford University, England, in 1966; and a JD from Yale Law School in 1975.
He has published: “Lunching on Olympus”, on four memorable lunches with Auden, Empson, Larkin and E.M. Forster, published by The American Scholar and chosen for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best Essays of 2010 and published in Resurgent Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain; “Another Sage of Baltimore: Murray Kempton”, published by the Literary House Press, Washington College, originally the Harwood Lecture in American Journalism, and “Being There”, a review of war poetry, in Oxford Journals’ Essays in Criticism.
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May 30, 2012:
Steven Isenberg's Letter to PEN President Peter Godwin
On May 30, 2012, PEN American Center's Executive Director Steven Isenberg sent the following letter to Board President Peter Godwin.

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May 30, 2012

To: Peter Godwin
cc: The Board of Trustees


Dear Peter,

I wish to inform the Board that I will be leaving at the end of this year. I write to you now to give ample time for the search for my successor and to ensure a smooth, effective transition.

By year’s end, PEN American Center will have finished celebrating its 90th anniversary, and I will be 72. Taking that together with the strength of our accomplishments, the course that we have set, and our staff's readiness for the future, I am confident that my decision is right not only for me, but also for PEN.

We can look back over these last three years with great satisfaction, having taken on challenges with energy and resolve, including the economic uncertainty which continues.

•    We have had exceptional success in winning support for our Freedom to Write Program from the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation and most recently from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. Our travels to China, Russia, Mexico, Haiti—and soon, South Africa—have come at moments of significance for the cause of freedom of expression, as did our appearance at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, and our role in advocating for the Nobel Prize for Liu Xiaobo, a campaign that was praised by Chinese political prisoner and friend of Liu Xiaobo, Yang Jianli: “Your outstanding work has inspired many Chinese freedom fighters like Mr. Liu and myself. Your brilliant efforts in ‘Free Liu Xiaobo’ are truly admirable and indispensible to our cause.”

•    We brought research, testimony and conviction to our nation's conscience by calling attention to the instances of torture that stained our response to the attacks of September 11th.  Bill Moyers’ show Sunday night amplified the reach of our Reckoning With Torture program and highlighted the work that is yet to be done.

•    We face an exciting prospect in the new capabilities and content on our web site when it is upgraded this fall; it is the way of the future and of importance to all we do. The redesigned web site will be a center of communication, publishing, and archival resources that will enhance all our programs. Just last week we received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to aid in the preservation and digitization of PEN’s archival materials. This is a tremendous opportunity to understand the reach and content of PEN’s archives and begin the planning process to make available on our web site the extraordinary materials accumulated over PEN’s 90-year history. Adding in new activity in social media, our electronic presence will foster greater involvement for our members and all who are interested in PEN’s calling, thereby enlarging our community and connections, here and internationally. This investment in our web site upgrade has been made possible by generous grants from the Carnegie Foundation, Google, and two loyal and generous Board members.

•    Our literary identity, devotion to literature, and close ties to PEN centers around the world make us distinctive in the human rights community. Our unique and vibrant World Voices Festival, Translation Fund, Literary Awards, Prison Writing, Readers and Writers Program in partnership with schools, and the PEN Journal each play their part, as do many member-driven committees, which continue to thrive on the imagination and goodwill of writers who give of their time in sustaining the literary tradition that makes possible all we do.

•    Every single PEN program has its generous and kind friends and supporters— individuals, families, companies, and foundations. From the Gala to the annual appeal to Authors’ Evenings, our benefactors have carried us to new achievements. And every program at PEN has benefited from the extraordinary support of the Kaplen Foundation, for whom special praise and gratitude is deserved in the largest measure.

•    By redefining our membership qualifications and reinvigorating our membership efforts, by the establishment of new bylaws and improved governance, and in the fostering of the kind of managerial agility non profits must strive for, we have made our mark and provided balance and focus for PEN as we head toward PEN’s 100th anniversary.

All of this comes of a staff wonderfully committed to PEN’s purposes and to their work as professionals in its cause. They distinguish themselves and PEN’s reputation by their character, idealism, and industry.

So too, among our present and former Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, ex-presidents, and membership, there are so many whose dedication, participation, and generosity help PEN maintain its special place.

And from all my working years and these last three, there are friends old and new, who have given me encouraging and kind support.

I have served with two presidents, Anthony Appiah and you, and I know that PEN is all the better for your presence and involvement. We have several months more together, and I know we will continue to reach new achievements and position PEN for the future.

I am grateful for what PEN has taught me.  I will always be at its side, as will all who know PEN's special qualities, and what it stands for, especially in the times in which we now live.

Yours,

Steve