Dear Friends,

On behalf of the members of PEN American Center – the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization – it’s our great pleasure to welcome you to the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, which will run in New York City from Monday April 25 to Sunday, May 1.

The festival is now in its seventh year, and this year brings many changes, including a new director and a new home. For the first time ever, the festival will take place on and around the High Line and at The Standard, New York, though we’ll be producing events at some favorite former festival venues, too.

Its been a landmark year for PEN with the success of our campaign, alongside many others, to persuade the Nobel Committee to grant Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize. A key mission of the PEN World Voices Festival is to encourage people to speak out against censorship and condemn the suppression of freedom of expression everywhere. We firmly believe in literature as a key weapon in fighting this battle.

We live in a time of great changes and challenges, and the need to remind ourselves of our basic values is as important as ever: we have to reinforce our power to be able to analyze and understand the turbulent phenomena of our culture.

Twenty five years ago, in 1986, PEN’s then-president Norman Mailer organized a now-legendary conference to discuss the global status of literature. Participants discussed the need to include more women writers, what politics (and politicians) had to do with literature, and the responsibilities of the writer. In the idealistic spirit of the 1986 Congress, our PEN World Voices Festival will be introducing a new, one-day conference. We are calling it the Working Day, and its aim is to address the many challenges facing the world of literature. In the new world shaped by the digital revolution and the proliferation of voices in the blogosphere, is there still a special place for literature and its creators in addressing national and global communities? Can writers still speak and be heard here in the United States or elsewhere, in the ways in which earlier PEN luminaries—like Mailer, like Susan Sontag—once were?

Besides the Working Day we are featuring events which we believe are essential to deepening our understanding of the interweaving of politics and literature. We will have, for example, lectures and discussions on the socio-literary landscape in China and also in Russia. There will be a panel on the American prison system, a late night conversation on WikiLeaks, and a firsthand account of the Middle East revolutions.

And around these themes, we will be creating an atmosphere of rich, inventive and, above all, free-spirited literary conversations, involving a stellar line-up of writers from all over the world. One of the highlights of this year’s festival will be an event called Poetry: The Second Skin, a literary extravaganza with poets from around the globe, exploring the music of poetry and the poetry of music.

By attending PEN World Voices Festival events, you are not only enjoying and supporting literature, you are actually making a difference. Literature, which is usually thought of as a solitary pursuit, can create a community. After all, literature is about us, the way we live our lives, and the way we would like to live our lives. What we read and write defines us. Literature is our second skin. It protects and makes us who we are.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the world of literature at the Seventh PEN World Voices Festival.