OUR VICTORIES

• In 2024, dozens withdrew their books from consideration for PEN America’s Literary Awards, resulting in the cancellation of the awards ceremony. 

• In 2024 and again in 2025, the Jean Stein prize of $75,000 was redirected to relief efforts in Gaza at the request of the Stein estate. Both years, the prize became unawardable after longlisters withdrew in accordance with the writer-led boycott of PEN America.

• The 2024 World Voices Festival was cancelled after overwhelming withdrawals. 

• Staff turnover hit an all-time high in 2024 as the so-called “free speech” organization clamped down on the free expression of its own staffers. 

• In November 2024, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel — a Zionist — resigned, thus fulfilling one of the foremost demands of our campaign.

After months of genocide apologia, craven handwringing, empty rhetoric, and refusal of accountability, we are left with only one option: BOYCOTT PEN AMERICA. The organization has sold us out. It has betrayed writers, readers, and its own staff in the service of the professional and political ambitions of its CEO, Suzanne Nossel, who has spent her career cheerleading war, promoting Islamophobia, and platforming genocidaires. 

We are done waiting for PEN America to hold itself accountable. As writers, editors, and translators of conscience we call for a BOYCOTT of all of PEN America’s projects, events, and activities. We will not submit writing to their awards. We will refuse to attend, accept, participate in, or publicize their events, prizes, galas, panels, publications, and readings. Our boycott will not end until the following demands are met.

1. Commit to highlighting and uplifting imprisoned Palestinian writers. This includes material support of efforts to free Palestinian prisoners, as well as strenuously opposing the repression of writers speaking up against the Zionist state both in Palestine and worldwide, especially in the shadow of the Trump administration;

2. Keep promises made about accountability structures; make those efforts transparent and open to staff and membership, and make the details broadly available to the general public;

3. Open a comprehensive, independent audit of PEN America’s finances, including of grants, awards, endowments, and external partnerships, to be made fully transparent and available to members and staff;

4. Tell the truth: change the obfuscating language PEN America uses to refer to the genocide in Gaza. For example, using the word genocide instead of “Israel-Hamas war”; occupation of Palestine instead of “Israeli-Palestinian conflict;”

5. Publicly sign on to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI);

6. Immediately and permanently cease efforts to establish a “PEN ‘Israel;’” 

7. Recognize the strategy, efficacy, and political necessity of boycott as a tactic, and cease the denigration of those involved in such campaigns. Apologize publicly to writers defamed in opinion pieces published by PEN America board members and allies in the wake of the awards and festival cancellations, and to Randa Jarrar, who was forcibly removed from an event on January 31, 2024;

8. Apologize for PEN’s history of contributing to the normalization of ‘Israeli’ apartheid, and commit to opposing it in the future.

Be sure to let PEN America know you’re joining the boycott so they feel it in full force. You can use this email template which you may use in full or part to let PEN America know where you stand.