Children's Book Caucus Discovery Evening

Sunday, April 30 at 6:30 PM
Simmons College
Boston, MA

Free parking is available on site. Please come and help celebrate the winners! For more information about the winners of this year's award, click here.

The Pen and the Sword: Writing and Expression in Wartime and the 2006 Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award Ceremony

Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 7:00 PM
First Parish Church, Cambridge
(3 Church Street, on the corner of Church Street and Massachusetts Avenue, Harvard Square)

War, in most obvious ways, is the enemy of free expression: truth gives way to propaganda; dissent is squelched; and as soldiers and civilians die, so too die their views and their voices. And yet, from Homer to Hemingway and beyond, war has inspired some of our greatest writers to do their greatest work. As the United States continues waging its current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the first books emerge out of these conflicts, PEN New England is convening a diverse group of writers to discuss the special questions posed for writers in wartime.

Panelists

• Rebecca Faery (Moderator), author of Cartographies of Desire, directs First Year Writing in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. She is currently writing a collection of personal essays on the Vietnam War.
• James Carroll, Boston Globe columnist and National Book Award-winning author of An American Requiem and the forthcoming House of War, a history of the Pentagon.
• Nathaniel Fick, Iraq War veteran and author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, winner of the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discovery Award for nonfiction.
• Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation, one of Entertainment Weekly's "Top Ten Novels of 2005" and winner of the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discovery Award for fiction.

The 2006 Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award

The Vasyl Stus Award recognizes a writer who has been persecuted for the peaceful expression of his or her views, and whose courage in the face of censorship and oppression has been exemplary. The 2006 Vasyl Stus Freedom to Write Award will be presented (in absentia) to Shi Tao, a Chinese poet and journalist who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for having disseminated a Chinese government document about the Tiananmen Square anniversary rites.

For more information, contact pen_ne@lesley.edu.

Panelists' books will be available for purchase from Harvard Bookstore.

Directions to First Parish Church: Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes. As you exit the station, cross Mass. Ave. and look for the newsstand called Nini's Corner. Turn right and proceed one block north along Mass. Ave. going toward the Cambridge Common. You will pass the Harvard Coop, Bank of America, and CVS. The First Parish Church is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Church St. Please enter through the front door of the church. Additional directions are also available elsewhere online.

Jane Brox Reads at Hotel Marlowe

Wednesday, April 5, 2006
From 6:15 PM to 7:00 PM
(During Wine Hour, which begins at 5:30 PM)

Jane Brox's third book, Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm, was published by North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2004. The paperback edition is scheduled to appear in September 2005. Her second book, Five Thousand Days Like This One, published by Beacon Press, was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, and her first, Here and Nowhere Else, also published by Beacon, won the 1996 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review and other journals and magazines, and have been selected for inclusion in many anthologies, including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and is the recipient of the 2005 New England Book Award for nonfiction. She teaches nonfiction writing in the MFA program at Lesley College in Cambridge, MA, and lives in Maine.

Porter Square Books will be selling books at this reading.

The Hotel Marlowe is located at 25 Edwin H. Land Boulevard, Cambridge. Inexpensive parking is available in the Cambridgeside Galleria garage with direct entry into the hotel from Levels A and C. The hotel is closest to the Lechmere T-stop, and is within walking distance of Charles and Kendall Square.

For more information call 617-824-8820 or e-mail pen_ne@lesley.edu

2006 Hemingway/PEN and Winship Awards Ceremony

Sunday April 2, 2006
From 3:00 - 4:00 PM
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Boston, MA

On Sunday, April 2, PEN/New England and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum will honor Yiyun Li as the 2006 recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House).

Patrick Hemingway, the son of Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, will present the prestigious literary award at the April 2nd ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Joyce Carol Oates will serve as the ceremony's keynote speaker. Ernest Hemingway's papers are archived at the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The late Mary Hemingway, the wife of Ernest Hemingway, founded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1976 to honor her late husband and draw attention to first books of fiction. Judges for the award this year were acclaimed fiction writers Charlotte Bacon and Bernard Cooper, both winners of the Hemingway/PEN award for their own first books, and Rosellen Brown.

Finalists in the competition for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award were Douglas Trevor for The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press) and Daniel Alarcon for War by Candlelight (HarperCollins). Runners-up were Jess Row for The Train to Lo Wu (The Dial Press) and Karen Olsson for Waterloo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Yiyun Li will receive an $8,000 prize from the Hemingway Foundation and a one week residency in The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho's MFA Program in Creative Writing. Li and competition finalists and runners-up receive Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers.

The ceremony will also honor writers Stanley Kunitz, Leo Damrosch, and Jennifer Haigh as recipients of the 2006 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, given annually to an author from New England or to an author whose writing includes a New England setting. Mr. Kunitz is being recognized in the poetry category for The Wild Braid (W.W. Norton), Mr. Damrosch is being honored in the non-fiction category for Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin), and Ms. Haigh is being honored in the fiction category for Baker Towers (HarperCollins). Judges for the awards this year were authors Rhina Espaillat, John Skoyles and Ted Weesner. The L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award was established by The Boston Globe in 1975 to honor long-time Boston Globe editor Laurence L. Winship. It has been awarded in the past to E.B. White, Andre Dubus, Susan Cheever, Tracy Kidder, Mary Oliver, Susan Quinn, Jill Ker Conway, Jan Swafford, and Anita Shreve.

With a writing career that spans 25 years, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism and essays. Her writing has earned many awards including the National Book Award for her novel them (1969), the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction, the Rea Award for Short Story, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy Institute. She also has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The ceremony will take place on Sunday, April 2, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Those interested in attending should call the Kennedy Presidential Library at 617.514.1643 to reserve a seat.

For more details, visit the Awards section.