PEN America will present the 2020 PEN World Voices Festival: These Truths, celebrating literature's deep illumination of cultural, historical, political, and emotional truths in a complex moment when "truth" is destabilized by the constant undermining of a common set of facts, "objective" histories are being interrogated and upended, and radical candor about lived experiences is fueling powerful social movements. Today, PEN America announced highlights of the festival, which brings together fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, translators, thinkers, and activists for an array of conversations, interviews, readings, and musical performances on this infinitely prismatic subject.
Chip Rolley, Director of the PEN World Voices Festival and Senior Director of Literary Programs at PEN America, describes arriving at this year's theme: "The crisis in truth in the American political sphere and a hallowed phrase from the U.S. Declaration of Independence were the jumping-off points for a festival that ultimately celebrates truth-telling on a wide range of topics and in myriad forms. We urgently need to hear the deeper truths afforded by literary fiction and by poetry, for literature to engage with contested histories and memory, and for journalists, historians and other non-fiction writers to present the world as it really is, to contest the fabrications served to us on an almost daily basis."
PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel says, "At a moment when we can rely on government officials neither to tell nor to face the truth, citizens must step into the breach. Truth-tellers such as investigative journalists, the courageous women behind the #MeToo movement, and the risk-everything whistleblowers attesting to government wrongdoing are driving the discourse while facing unrelenting attacks. Against this norm-defying backdrop, PEN America is proud to convene some of the world's most transformative writers and thinkers in a show of force on behalf of complexity, facts, and veracity."
The 2020 PEN World Voices Festival opens May 4 with three of our most compelling truth-tellers-Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay, and Jia Tolentino-speaking with
Rebecca Traister at The Town Hall about how women's lives have been shaped by historical forces, religious and political dogma, today's resurgent misogyny, and societal and personal gaslighting, that most cunning undermining of lived reality.
On May 6 at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, delivers the festival's annual keynote address, the
Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, given in recent years by Arundhati Roy (2019) and former Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton (2018). Hannah-Jones discusses her journalistic mission to reframe how we understand our nation, the legacy of slavery, and the unparalleled role Black people have played in U.S. democracy.
Like Hannah-Jones, bestselling author David Treuer (The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee) offers a powerful counter-narrative to a monolithic history-in this case, rebutting conventional wisdom about Native American experience (May 5 at Brooklyn Historical Society). In an event entitled The Last Archive, on May 7 at
Symphony Space, celebrated historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States) interrogates a question at the heart of this year's festival: How do we find the truth in the age of Google and "alternative" facts? Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, Maja Lunde, and Emily Raboteau come together May 9 at the AIA Center for Architecture to consider the role of the writer in a society that denies science and the everyday realities of extreme weather amidst impending apocalypse.
Other events underscore the truth-telling potential of the creative act. On May 6 at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri discusses his latest book, The Freedom Artist, which imagines a society where the disappearance of books and diminishment of literacy have led to the creation of a dystopia devoid of truth. On the heels of her Netflix comedy special Stage Fright,
Jenny Slate will speak with Vulture writer Hunter Harris about her unclassifiable, keenly personal book Little Weirds (May 6 at the New School). On May 7 at Center for Fiction, Turkish-British writer-activist Elif Shafak and literary critic and Literary Hub Executive Editor
John Freeman explore how words themselves have been used to misrepresent and distort reality, and how they can be reclaimed. Also on May 7, at
Symphony Space, playwrights Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play, Daddy, and Black Exhibition) and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner
Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined, and Intimate Apparel) discuss their impulse to expose uncomfortable, often hidden truths about race, class, and sexuality in American society.
PEN America President Jennifer Egan says, "A festival of writers, artists, and intellectuals affords a tonic opportunity to explore pressing topics from creative and unexpected angles. The offerings in "These Truths" include an evening melding dystopian fiction and West African music; a Russian queer poetry reading; and a cross-generational discussion between prominent Mexican novelists about how art can reclaim and subvert cultural stereotypes-to name just a smattering of auspicious events."
For more information visit: https://pen.org/world-voices-festival/
Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos
