The PEN World Voices Festival will hold an emergency summit in May in response to the war in Ukraine. More than one hundred writers will gather, and the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov will deliver a speech “that will address threats to democracy and free expression.”
Rabih Alameddine has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which follows a transgender doctor working in Lesbos at a camp for Syrian refugees. “In a year of stunning and important fiction,” judges Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar Scott note, “this work stands as a particular achievement: a novel that cries out to be heard and that teaches us, both intrinsically and extrinsically, what story can do.”
Duke University Press has filed an appeal with the NLRB contesting their workers’ union election.
New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu is making a zine series “about music and life” called “Suspended in Time.” Hsu describes it as “an oral history of everyone who has ever been deeply into shit.” The first edition is about Noah, a Bay Area teen who played a major role in shaping the visual culture of 1990s Bay rap.
Astra magazine’s website is now live, with select print pieces available to read for free. The magazine will also publish online-only essays and criticism. Up now, Nada Alic considers her recent search history, Zack Graham writes about underground raves, and Anton Hur imagines fleeing the US in the near future.
Tonight at 7:30pm, Lincoln Center in New York City is hosting “From Past to Present: The Work of Audre Lorde,” featuring archivist Zakiya Collier, Lincoln Center’s poet-in-residence Mahogany L. Browne, and poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. The event is part of the series “Voices of a People’s History,” which celebrates historian Howard Zinn, who would have been one hundred years old this year. For more on Lorde, check out Gabrielle Bellot’s appreciation in our Fall 2020 issue.