Dear PEN Members and Friends,

With your essential contributions of time and material support, PEN has concluded another year of notable progress in our efforts to foster and recognize great literature; defend the free expression on which it depends; and support the international literary fellowship that exists despite governments, fellowship that Walt Whitman hoped would bind “the lands of the earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy.” This report includes information about each PEN program and financial data covering the most recent fiscal period.

The year brought important achievements in every area of PEN’s activity. The Readers & Writers and Writing Institute programs introduced 25 PEN authors to underserved public school students, and three Institute participants won prestigious Scholastic Writing Awards, including the top prize of a $10,000 national scholarship. PEN’s own distinguished program of literary prizes honored 22 authors and translators and launched a new award for biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award. The PEN Writers' Fund made available over $50,000 to writers in financial crisis. Our Prison Writing Program distributed 8,000 handbooks to prisons across the country and provided 85 mentors to aspiring writer-inmates. PEN’s literary journal, PEN America, published its eighth issue,“Making Histories,” celebrating the unique capacity of literature to do “the work that historians and politicians have neglected to do.” Against this backdrop PEN’s membership climbed to almost 3,400, with our ranks newly augmented by some 1,100 Associate Members.

PEN’s hallmark free-expression advocacy made important advances both domestically and in some of the most challenging international settings. A major campaign to pressure the Chinese government to ease censorship and repression in the run-up to the Olympics garnered unprecedented press coverage and contributed to the release of five dissidents. An effort on behalf of Iraqi writers and translators targeted for death successfully resettled dozens of Iraqis with their families. At home, PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms fought to end the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans and reverse the exclusion of foreign writers and scholars from the United States based on their political views.

The 2008 PEN World Voices Festival once again made New York the world’s literary crossroads. Under the theme “Public Lives/Private Lives,” participants from more than 50 countries examined issues ranging from the expression of identity in the face of cultural difference to the meaning of privacy in an age of unfettered media. Throughout the year, PEN’s public programs celebrated writers and writing, including tributes to PEN icon Grace Paley and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart on the 50th anniversary of its publication.

We hope that you will review what has been accomplished with your help and choose to continue your generous support. For the latest information on PEN, please join the more than 2 million people world wide who have followed PEN’s programming over the past year at our interactive web site: www.pen.org.

With thanks and warm regards,

Francine Prose		Michael Roberts