Roxane gay open letter

It contained the signatures of over writers, including Roxane Gay, Marie-Helene Bertino, Saeed Jones,Laura van den Berg, Myriam Gurba, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Beowulf Forever? We demand PEN America release an official statement about the poetsplaywrights, journalists, scholars and novelists killed in Gaza and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.

As this letter circulates, the death toll among Palestinian writers and reporters will likely grow. We demand that PEN America apologize to Jarrar for these actions and take more concrete steps to support Palestinian writers in the face of a new wave of repression, retaliation and bigotry rippling through publishing, academia, and the creative arts industries.

We demand PEN find the same zeal and passion that they have for banned books in the US to speak out about actual human beings in Palestine. The bare minimum. In doing so, PEN is perpetuating dangerous, fascist views and offering tacit approval for the Zionist, racist and genocidal regime.

You can see a full list of signatories, and add your own name, here. Destroying universities is the ultimate repression roxane campus free speech. We demand PEN wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.

The Latest. What Should You Read Next? Your guide to transportation horror-cide October 10, by John Hornor Jacobs. Murdering writers and bombing libraries is the open book ban. All these struggles are crucial to this time. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (), the novel An Untamed State (), the short story collection Difficult Women (), and the memoir.

But when PEN only speaks out about banned books here while our tax dollars fund a genocide, it deepens its complicity. We demand PEN America create a legal strategy to get Palestinian authors and poets asylum immediately, and to publicize these efforts; to use its institutional power and resources, just as PEN does under the Writers in Crisis and Writers at Risk programs.

PEN America gay perpetuates fascist nation-statehood, which becomes especially dangerous when the organization is so keen to define literary citizenship and freedom of speech. Dan Sheehan February 9, Like this: Like Loading Share Save. The letter letter, as a genre, is far too limited.

Whose freedom does PEN protect, if outside of press releases buried on its website, PEN has remained silent about Palestinian journalists, writers, and poets murdered by Israel? Last week, an open letter addressed to PEN America was sent. Advertisers: Contact Us.

Privacy Policy. There is no form of censorship more powerful than the extermination of an entire people, no silencing more absolute than genocide. We demand PEN raise just as much hell over the unlawful detainment since December 12 of Mostafa Sheta, director of the Freedom Theater in Jenin, by Zionist occupation forces, as they do about those being unlawfully detained by states in opposition to the United States.

The names are a few of more than 1, authors showing their support to trans and non-binary communities in an open letter. Roxane Gay (born October 15, ) is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Over writers and poets [3/10/ Update: this number now stands at over ]—including Roxane Gay, Alissa Nutting, Marie-Helene Bertino, Kiese Laymon, Saeed Jones, Fady Joudah, Carmen Maria Machado, Solmaz Sharif, Tommy Pico, Laura van den Berg, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah—have signed an impassioned open letter to PEN America.

We speak with conviction, and then what?.