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PEN American Center (PEN), founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship.

The Center has a membership of 3,300 writers, editors, and translators.

Over the years, PEN American Center's membership has been comprised of many of the leading lights in the American literary establishment, including James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and John Steinbeck.

In addition to defending persecuted writers, PEN American Center sponsors public literary programs and forums on current issues, sends prominent authors to inner-city schools to encourage reading and writing, administers literary prizes, promotes international literature that might otherwise go unread in the United States, and offers grants and loans to writers facing financial or medical emergencies.

Since 2005, PEN American Center has hosted the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City, which brings renowned writers from around the world together to share ideas, give public readings and talks, and foster debate on literature and freedom of expression.

PEN is the largest of the 144 centers that belong to International PEN, the worldwide association of writers that defends those who are harassed, imprisoned and killed for their views.

PEN is also a member of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, a global network of nongovernmental organizations that monitors free expression violations worldwide and defends journalists, writers, human rights activists and Internet users who are persecuted for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

PEN American Center has an extensive program of annual awards and fellowships that serve to recognize recent outstanding endeavours in various literary fields and to encourage different forms of literary production:

• PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award
• PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award
• PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, for children's or young-adult fiction.
• PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama: a medal for an accomplished dramatist, and a stipend for an up-and-coming playwright.
• PEN/Nora Magid Award, for magazine publishing.
• PEN Publisher Award, for publishers in general.
• PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers whose début works are deemed to show "great promise".
• PEN/Beyond Margins Award, for books by authors of color.
• PEN/Nabokov Award, for writers who have made achievements "in a variety of literary genres".
• PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction,
• PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.
• PEN/Jerard Fund Award, for promising women writers of general nonfiction.
• PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, for U.S. poets with a "notable and accomplished presence".
• PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, for emerging poets.
• PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, for book-length translations from any language into English.
• PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, for booklength translations from any language into English.
• PEN/Translation Fund Grants, to support the translation of works not previously available in English.
• PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, for literary translators who have shown "a commitment to excellence".
• Gregory Kolovakos Award, for translations from Spanish or other Hispanic languages.

• International PEN
• Media of New York City

• PEN American Center
• PEN World Voices
• PEN Events Audio Archive
• PEN Podcasts
• International PEN