Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde, Part II: The End of PEN America and A Future for Publishing In The Imperial Core
This essay is a companion to Joe Hall’s “PEN America: Cultural Imperialism’s Avant-Garde,” first published July 3, 2024. In this update, Hall re-examines PEN America in the context of continuing genocide in Palestine, war in Iran, and leadership changes at the organization as of August 2026.
“I suppose, having worked with PEN Utah for the past few years to fight for First Amendment rights and against book bans in my state, that it was just a matter of time till I myself got banned. I was slated to speak and deliver a lecture from my book THE BROKEN COUNTRY at the US Air Force Academy this September...”
—Paisley Rekdal, Facebook Post, August 24, 2025
“At the moment of the first strike she [fellow teacher Ms Shahriari] had been in the yard. When the first missile hit the school, [Ms Shahriari] ran toward a classroom to bring her students out, and then the second missile hit and unfortunately she was killed.”
—Wajiheh Zakari, Teacher at Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School
“I want to teach creative writing at the Naval Academy
I'll make the midshipmen slit their wrists
and write PEACE with their blood
on the hulls of nuclear submarines.”
—from “Nostalgia” by Chris Toll[1]
On February 28, 2026 the United States blew apart over one hundred and fifty children, the result of a double-tap Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab in Hormozgan Province in Southern Iran. This massacre was part of larger and ongoing U.S.-Israeli assault on the people and leadership of Iran that includes universities, refineries, and water facilities. This includes teachers, students, workers, everyone reliant on clean water, and the other-than-human beings in impacted ecologies. The assault extends the U.S. and Israeli massacres and city and village demolitions of Gaza and Lebanon.
The Minab massacre is one of many U.S.-Israeli war crimes. Part of the purpose of the scale of the initial wave of attacks that also included assassinations of political and religious leaders and the killing of several teenagers playing volleyball was to dismay the people of Iran into submission. Another purpose was to overwhelm the U.S. population into numbly accepting more U.S.-Israeli savagery past and present: the massacres of Iran, of Lebanon, and of Gaza. Who can absorb it all?
Such savage acts of the U.S. state occur while the U.S. deepens its participation in the genocide of Palestinians, building a base at the edge of the concentration camp of Gaza; proposing legislation to formalize military integration with Israel; and continuing the years-long campaign of criminalizing speech in solidarity with Palestinians and jailing and sometimes deporting protestors. The U.S. has doubled down on the eradication of the Palestinian people even as reports continue to flow out of Palestine about the hellish depths of the occupation forces’ crimes, including the Israeli state’s systematic use of sexual violence against Palestinians, including training dogs to rape Palestinians.
This ongoing genocide, which is deeply interwoven with the fabric of U.S. and Israeli institutions, exists within a decades-long assault on the Arab and Islamic world by the U.S.-led imperialist coalition that has shattered several nations not aligned with the U.S. and killed millions in the Arab and Persian world.[2]
Moral collapse, unlimited barbarism abroad and at home.
[1] Republished in The Mystical Hobby of Christ: The Collected Poems of Chris Toll (zerodegreewritingprogram, 2026).
[2] See Ali Kadri, Imperialism with Reference to Syria (Springer, 2019).
PEN Returns to Form
So what about the literary resistance? What about PEN America, the self-appointed protector of free speech at home and across the globe?
I chronicled PEN America’s complicity with genocide, exhaustively, here in 2024, showing the organization to be an instrumental tool of cultural imperialism within a broader U.S. strategy of hybrid war against its enemies.
My initial article was part of a wave of criticism leveled against PEN America’s response to the genocide. PEN’s harmful actions were numerous and included contributing to the criminalization of student anti-genocide protests using lines of reasoning shared with reactionary organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which equates criticism of the actions of the ethno-supremacist state of Israel with anti-Semitism. Protests against PEN America’s remarkable failure to forward its purported mission included a total boycott of PEN America, which caused the cancellation of the 2024 awards and the ensuing gala. The writing community had PEN’s feet in the fire.
In 2025, in the face of sustained criticism by organizations like Writers Against the War on Gaza, PEN claimed it was changing its stance on Gaza. PEN’s reforms included a commitment to protecting writers in Gaza and the departure of CEO Suzanne Nossel. Nossel, an almost unbelievably committed hawk and influential imperial theorist, would eventually be replaced as PEN’s face by Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and faculty member at Bard College.
PEN began pledging money to Palestinian cultural workers, released a report detailing the destruction of Gaza’s cultural sites, and finally used the word ‘genocide’ to describe what numerous scholars, human rights groups, and international law organizations, including the International Court of Justice, called the unprecedented scale of violence unleashed against Palestinians for over a year—genocide. Believing PEN’s promise of reform, Writers Against the War on Gaza called off the boycott on December 31st, 2025. The campaign was celebrated as a success in outlets like Literary Hub.
A month after the United States killed over one hundred schoolchildren in Iran, on March 31 PEN America announced the winners of its 2026 Literary Awards. Writers quickly returned to crowing about receiving PEN literary awards and the attendant big money (“It’s an honor...,” “Still in Shock,” “thanks @penamerica”). PEN held a glitzy awards ceremony in New York City’s Town Hall hosted by actor Murray Hill. PEN was back in business, baby.
Sure, the genocide it helped launder continued, with Israel continuing to starve, bomb, and occupy Gaza. Sure, lawfare against student protestors continued as a result of the crackdowns PEN helped legitimize. But PEN assured everyone they were on the phone doing need-to-know things to help writers in Gaza. They got it.
Peace, justice, and all good things prevailed.
Right?
Jesus Christ. No.
Scandal engulfed PEN once again. In July 2026 PEN’s relatively new president Dinaw Mengestu resigned in response to PEN’s July 9 publication of “A Silent Moratorium.” “Moratorium” is a piece sympathetic to the “isolation and exclusion” of Israeli and Jewish writers. With the cultural boycott of Israel squarely in its sights, the piece also reiterates PEN’s stance against cultural and academic boycotts.
Mengestu was supposed to be the reform president that would more fully support PEN’s mission, which should ostensibly extend to Palestinian writers trying to survive. “A Silent Moratorium” represented PEN using its platform and capacities to both-sides genocide. Sure, Palestinians sheltering in shredded tents are enduring bombings and starvation, sure BDS tactics, which seek to exert economic pressure on the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel, are being criminalized. But what about the delicate egos of writers who “feel” they are experiencing temporarily diminished publishing opportunities? To give its argument the veneer of an empirical basis, the report draws on tallies of self-reported “antisemitic literary incidents.” These reports rely on faulty definitions of antisemitism that confuse criticism of the state of Israel and Israeli institutions with prejudice against Jewish people. Mengestu recognized the reports’ seemingly purposeful conflation of the terms in a lengthy Instagram post: “The cultural boycott of Israel is aimed at institutions, not individuals, to influence policy. There is no boycott of Jewish writers.” Mengestu then addressed the report’s loud silences, arguing that if the report were truly interested in discussing discrimination “It would engage with the hundreds of writers—Jewish and non-Jewish—who have received racist and insulting messages, been doxed, and blithely accused of antisemitism for speaking out against that genocide.”
On cue, PEN’s constant defender, The Atlantic, responded to Mengestu’s departure on July 11 with an article critical of Mengestu. Mengestu fired back, accusing PEN of an “ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably” and “production of work that supports suppression through bigotry and indifference.” Mengestu then published an article in Lit Hub on July 17 illustrating how PEN subtly but definitively changed its stance on boycotts: they are not protected speech. By taking this stance, PEN falls in line with a raft of draconian anti-BDS laws, hanging writers and organizations who boycott Israel out to dry, as it had done with student protestors in 2024.
Our champion of free speech has fled the field. PEN’s brief about-face is over.
PEN, to any writer with a conscience, should be over—an enemy, a wolf wearing the soft wool of humanitarian concern.
But this essay isn’t over. Because we should have seen this coming. Viewed through PEN’s relationship to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, PEN never meaningfully change its pattern of behavior during Mengestu’s tenure. Viewed through the composition of its board, PEN never ended its service to the war-making state.
A Massacre-Friendly Board
While presidents and CEOs help formulate strategy and oversee day-to-day operations, boards often have the final say over top-level personnel decisions and provide organizational oversight. They can exert meaningful pressure on staff and, in doing so, shape an organization over the longest terms. A serious oversight in my previous report on PEN America was forgoing an analysis of its board. Such an analysis is overdue.
A close examination of the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee (all Executive Committee members are also board members) composition helps explain PEN’s return to redirecting concern away from Palestinians writers to Israeli writers and adoption of a definitively anti-BDS stance.
The findings that follow are a result of examining the institutional affiliations and publishing activity of this group of 36 as of June 2026.
The Council on Foreign Relations & The Foreign Policy Blob
The Council on Foreign Relations is a long-standing and influential Atlanticist think-tank with deep Wall Street ties dedicated to fleshing out imperial grand strategy. It takes as its sine qua non the rightness of maintaining the United States’ place bestride the international order against the dark authoritarian other (Iran, China). The threat or use of violence is central to that pursuit.[3] CFR has received millions in funding from Pentagon contractors. Members of the CFR have ties to major players in the military industrial complex like the Rand Corporation, the Department of Defense, and Boeing. Foreign-policy think tanks themselves are integral parts of the military industrial complex.
CFR members sitting on PEN America’s board include Tracy Higgins (Executive Vice President), Markus Dohle (Treasurer), Ken Miller, Patricia Duff, and Tom Healy. Their activity reflects CFR’s imperial orientation. Dohle, a former CEO of Penguin Random House, has appeared at book industry events in Israel and conducted an interview with the hawkish Atlantic Council.[4] Ken Miller is a millionaire with deep Wall Street ties who has donated thousands of dollars to hawkish establishment democrats who have been stalwarts in ensuring the flow of arms to Israel like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Patricia Duff, in addition to being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is the CEO of the non-profit Common Good, whose American Renewal Project has featured events with die-hard centrists Rahm Emanuel and Andy Beshear. Emanuel recently put on the record in a conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations a plan to strengthen the Abraham Accords in order to cement the U.S.’s and Israel’s presence in the Middle East.[5]
Perhaps most troubling, board member Maria Arana has direct military ties. She was a member of the Advisory Board for SOUTHCOM, the U.S. Military Command for Central and South America. The purpose of SOUTHCOM is to exert power over the Caribbean and Central and South America through violence and its threat. The list of the war crimes, coups, and atrocities that SOUTHCOM is implicated in is too numerous for this essay. They include the ongoing torture and killing of ‘narcoterrorists,’ many of which were actually just fisherman. Experts have described these as war crimes.
Remarkably, one in six PEN America Board members has ties to the military or military industrial complex. This includes three of its eight-member Executive Committee (Higgins, Dohle, Arana), where they exert outsized influence. This center of gravity of ‘foreign policy expertise’ for PEN is defined by the nationalist liberal-imperial worldview of the Council on Foreign Affairs. Over the past two decades, this worldview, as realized through U.S. state action, has led to a body count and human immiseration beyond reckoning in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and now in Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.
Further, given PEN’s historic ties to the CIA and State Department, its present deep connections to the military-industrial and foreign policy blob also do little to dispel doubts that PEN is in service of bloody-minded U.S. foreign policy objectives or that PEN can be evenhanded when speaking about close U.S.-allies, such as its partner in war on Iran and genocide in Palestine: Israel.[7]
The Western Neocolonial ‘Aid’ Complex
There is no counterbalance to this imperialist bloc on PEN’s board in terms of claims to foreign policy or international expertise that aren’t grounded in imperial or colonial frameworks. For instance, two members of the board have worked for neocolonial NGOs.
Suzy Wahba is a former consultant to the World Bank, an institution heavily involved in subordinating global South countries to the U.S.-led capitalist system, burdening them with Structural Adjustment Programs that tied loans to state austerity and the privatization of lands and industries.[8]
Board member and current co-CEO Summer Lopez has a similar, troubling resume that in many ways reflects that of former CEO Suzanne Nossel’s. Lopez spent five months on Freedom House’s Middle East and North Africa Team. Freedom House has long been understood to be in service of U.S. foreign policy aims. It is largely funded by the state, including the U.S. Department of State. Lopez transitioned from Freedom House to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she spent eight years in influential roles, including as the Acting Middle East Regional Coordinator for the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance. There is a large body of reporting and scholarship on USAID’s involvement in dirty wars, regime change, and election interference.[9] ‘Democracy’ promotion, in the hands of the U.S., often means by any means necessary.
With this background, Summer Lopez played a key role at PEN, serving first as Suzanne Nossel’s Senior Director of the Free Expressions Program from 2017 to 2022 then as the Free Expression Chief Program Officer. She represents another link in the chain between the old PEN delegitimizing student anti-genocide protests and the new PEN helping build the case for war on Iran.
Wall Street, Developers, Landlords, and Millionaires
Wall Street, the real estate industry, and the ultra-wealthy are well-represented on PEN’s board. These board members include Ken Miller, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger, Roxanne Donovan, Morwin Schmookler, John T. Chao, and Suzy Wahba.
Ken Miller is the president and CEO of Ken Miller Capital. He has spent his life as a financier and financial advisor. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger serves as a board member of the New York City Police Foundation. Her late husband was the former chairman of the New York City Police Foundation. Hemmerdinger’s links to the police foundation are particularly relevant given PEN’s refusal to defend student protestors as the NYPD was arresting scores of students. Hemmerdinger was also a 44-year employee of the Hemmerdinger family-owned ATCO properties, a deep-pocketed, major real estate player. ATCO has had entanglements with Israeli investment firms.
Roxanne Donovan, a former writer for the New York Daily News, is the president of a large firm that does public relations for real estate companies. Among Donavan’s clients are RFR, which does deals in Israel, and Jack Rosen, who is deeply invested in lobbying for Israel’s interests.
John T. Chao, a former McKinsey partner advising energy companies, serves on the board of Westlake Petrochemicals. His father, James Chao, is estimated to own 25% of Westlake. Forbes estimates the worth of the Chao family at over three billion dollars. There’s a rough consensus that under Trump the U.S. has returned to oil imperialism. Chao’s financial stake in dirty energy could represent a conflict of interest when it comes to PEN commenting on foreign policy matters.
Though PEN claims to represent writers across the globe, the priorities of many of PEN’s board members are those of western capital. When making personnel decisions and setting the priorities for PEN, these individuals are not free of the priorities and pressures of the institutions they align with and profit from.
Defending PEN, Downplaying Genocide: PEN’s Media Industry Ties
PEN’s board also includes numerous ties to the wider media industry, including Hollywood and the highest echelons of the book industry. This includes Hachette CEO David Shelley, who faced protests and quits from staff after establishing the Basic Liberty imprint in 2024 and hiring a fellow at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, Thomas Spence, as an editorial director. The Heritage Foundation authored Project 2025. This PEN board member seems to be quite fine profiting from publishing the intellectual scaffolding for migrant concentration camps.
Three board members are or have been regular contributors or columnists for The Atlantic: George Packer, Phil Klay, and Zachary Karabell. This centrist magazine has published numerous articles post-Oct 7th defending PEN from criticism while also engaging in genocide denial. Its Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, is a former IDF member who served as a prison guard at Israel’s Ktzi’ot prison. In his memoir, Prisoners: a story of friendship and terror, Goldberg describes concealing the torture of a Palestinian prisoner and admits to participating in beating Palestinian prisoners. This is just what he will admit. Torture in these prisons has been thoroughly documented.
Under Goldberg’s editorship, PEN board member George Packer penned the infamous “When Writers Silence Writers: PEN America and the Authoritarian Spirit,” defending PEN’s dangerous response to student protests. In March of 2024, Marine veteran Phil Klay wrote an essay for The Atlantic, “The Cowardice of Guernica,” criticizing the magazine for being too responsive to staff members and the public who criticized it for publishing an essay that forwarded a morally confused, settler vision of the occupation and genocide six months into Israel’s campaign. In a recent Substack post, PEN board member, finance capitalist, and foreign policy expert Zachary Karabell was exultant over the destruction of Iran. He is a former regular contributor to the Atlantic via his “The Edgy Optimist Column” and has been a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy. Like Suzanne Nossel and Summer Lopez, he is an energetic theorist of the application of U.S. imperial power.
In recent weeks The Atlantic again defended PEN, characterizing Mengestu’s departure as an unfounded, hair-trigger response to what the author, a former Jerusalem Post writer, considers an eminently reasonable article.
Through The Atlantic, board members have promoted a genocide-indifferent literary culture and a genocide-indifferent PEN. While PEN contains board members willing to defend PEN’s worst moments in the public spotlight, no board members exhibit a similar willingness to publicly forward a vision of PEN that decisively protects pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide speech, opposes U.S. military interventions that annihilate writers and journalists, or protects the right to boycott genocide-supporting organizations at home.
The Board, In Total
Roughly half of PEN America’s board has ties to either the military industrial complex, Wall Street, real estate, big oil, neocolonial international financial institutions, or hawkish media.
These ties represent a multitude of potential conflicts of interest, some hypothetical, some quite concrete. Several board members draw paychecks from a media outlet that has consistently lashed out at critics that would seek to move PEN toward reform as PEN, ostensibly, seeks to reform. Several board members are part of a military industrial complex that profits from war and a foreign policy establishment predicated on identifying and dominating enemies of a U.S.-led world order. Several board members are tied to businesses with investments in Israel or have clients with financial stakes in Israel; they have financial incentives to move PEN to downplay Israel’s U.S.-funded world-shattering violence against Palestinians and its neighbor states. These ties fatally undermine PEN’s credibility when speaking to international affairs on a humanitarian basis.
Given this board, it is no wonder that PEN has again waffled in its approach to the U.S.’s ethno-supremacist partner.
Could it be another way? Of course.
PEN’s board could include any number of journalists, academics, or writers who are consistent and principled critics of U.S. foreign policy and wars of aggression, who are deeply knowledgeable about the evolving forms of western colonialism, all of which exert their own forms of coercion over speech, including the bullet, the bomb, and the crippling economic sanction. There are plenty of them out there. But PEN’s board does not include individuals like this.
If Dinaw Mengestu’s split with PEN represents a crack in its façade, its foundation remains strong.
While writers of conscience should certainly resume their boycott of PEN, the purpose of such a boycott should not be to reform it but to starve it of writers until it dies. Otherwise, PEN will continue to legitimize U.S. wars of aggression under the guise of humanitarian concern.
[3] See Laurence H. Shoup’s Wall Street’s Think Tank (Monthly Review Press, 2015).
[4] An organization caught in what has been described as a “pay-for-play” scheme with the oligarchical United Arab Emirates. https://prospect.org/2023/02/24/2023-02-24-based-corruption-fifth-estate-think-tanks/
[5] “If you redefine the Abraham Accords, which we’re party to, as a vehicle not just for UAE recognition of Israel and Israel recognition of Bahrain and UAE, but as a financing vehicle, and also for other political and economic purposes, you alter fundamentally, and you communicate to Iran, we are going nowhere.” https://www.cfr.org/event/a-conversation-with-rahm-emanuel
[6] The Revolving Door Project defines the Military Industrial Complex as “the array of arms manufacturers, defense contractors, private military contractors, think tanks, advocacy groups, and lobbyists with a vested interest in American foreign policy and the U.S. military establishment.” https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/the-industry-agenda-military-industrial-complex/
[7] Higgins, to her credit, signed a letter in 2016 defending students at Harvard Law School against criticism from the Israel Lobby.
[8] See Silvia Federici’s Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018).
[9] Scholars of USAID’s activities have noted how many of its documents reveal their understanding of democracy promotion as existing squarely within a framework of bolstering the power of private (and often Western-tied) capital within target states. In Bolivia, USAID’s activities were firmly in opposition to the rise of an indigenous-based socialist movement that would eventually challenge global north mining interests.
PEN’s Rafah Model for Iran: Weaponized Humanitarianism & Literary Community Mass Amnesia
PEN may have been forced to support Palestinians after Gaza’s destruction, but it never stopped speaking the language that enabled that destruction. There’s a bright line between the U.S. vaporizing the schoolchildren of Minab and PEN America’s activities, between PEN’s humanitarian concern and manufacturing consent for war.
In late 2025 and early 2026, economic protests broke out in Iran. After they turned violent, Iran cracked down on them. On cue, the PEN soft power machine kicked in to decry that crackdown in the strongest terms. On January 26, PEN issued a press release linking the larger state response to the arrest of the writer Ali Asodallhi: “In the context of horrific and widespread state-directed violence in which tens of thousands of protestors have been killed or wounded, coupled with a near-total internet blackout, the arrest of Ali Asadollahi on unknown charges is a grave assault on freedom of expression.” Four days later, PEN posted to Bluesky an article by their new co-CEO, Summer Lopez, an article in Just Security, about Iran’s arrest of writers in the context of the winter 2025-2026 protests. Just Security theorizes imperial strategy. For instance, a March 2026 article argues that the U.S.-Israeli assassination of Iran’s leadership and supreme leader (and his fourteen month old niece) was lawful, shattering an international norm that the U.S. had abided by for decades and opening the door wide for escalatory violence.
As with the 2023 and 2024 crackdowns on student Palestine solidarity protests, which PEN critiqued, in 2025 and 2026 the objects of PEN’s critique and the objects of the U.S. state violence coincided. PEN uses its platform to provide rhetorical cover for impending U.S. state violence by strategically weaponizing the language of rights, applying it on a highly selective international basis such that it promptly and overwhelmingly aligns with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Over the past year, despite draconian crackdowns on speech and protest in allies like the U.K. and Germany, and Israel’s continued assassination of Lebanese journalists, the overwhelming object of PEN’s international censure has remained China, Russia, and especially Iran.
Four days before the U.S. massacre of schoolchildren, PEN posted an open letter calling for the release of a writer jailed in Iran. Then bombs began to rain in Tehran, Minab, and elsewhere across Iran.
After war breaks out, PEN consistently fails to decry the annihilation of writers and destruction of culture via U.S. and Israeli bombs. In the case of Gaza, it only did so well after an enormous pressure campaign had been mounted against it and several months after enormous swathes of Gaza had been flattened, tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, and many more injured. This is the liberal-imperial mode.
Over the course of months and thousands of bombing sorties, the U.S.-Israeli war machine bombed Iranian cultural heritage sites like the Gholestan Palace, universities, and upwards of 55 libraries. PEN stayed silent on this cultural destruction.
This mirrored their silence during the Twelve-Day War in 2025 as well. In this war of aggression, Israel, with U.S.-backing, killed Iranian journalists, media workers, the poet Parnia Abassi, and the well-known painter Mansoureh.
Similarly, during the 2026 war on Iran, PEN had nothing to say about the U.S. stifling the free expression of artists by killing them. Soroush Khazaie was a twenty-nine-year-old new media artist who was into Radiohead and whose multimedia vocal performances were eventually banned by the state. On March 2, the U.S. killed him in his home in Tehran by dropping a bomb on it. In its various reports and posts PEN also left unmentioned U.S. and Israeli involvement in creating economic pain in Iran and setting the table for violence on the streets. There was no mention of the Israeli-initiated Twelve-Day War, no mention of decades of sanctions against Iran, no mention of the U.S. sending arms to Iranian dissidents, no mention of Mossad’s self-professed involvement in the uprising, and no skepticism of the numbers of dead civilians provided by U.S. state-funded groups. Iranians, like people of all nations, have legitimate grievances against their state and states must not respond to protests with bullets. However, it is likely that Israeli intelligence activityhelped amplify the violence that sparked this nation-wide crackdown in response. That crackdown was then framed as grounds for a humanitarian war by a white supremacist U.S. regime. Trump promised “help is on the way” and urged Iranians to continue protesting.
It was only after the historically unpopular, massive bombing campaign that killed thousands of civilians was well underway and to head off the embarrassment of the U.S. or Israel potentially killing the writers PEN advocates for that PEN released a statement of concern for the safety of these writers. Curiously, PEN limited its concerns to jailed writers and not the larger number of cultural workers in Iran, some of whom had already been killed by the U.S. and Israel. Nor does PEN, while calling for “all parties” to prioritize civilian safety in Iran, actually name the parties—the U.S. and Israel—dropping bombs on Iran.
Similarly, when Trump’s threats “to destroy Iranian civilization” stirred fears he might unleash nuclear war, PEN broadcast a statement it cosigned with several other humanitarian organizations condemning Trump’s language and arguing that if Trump carried out his threats, this would constitute a ‘war crime.’ Yet there’s no mention of the war crimes and destruction of civilizational infrastructure that the U.S. and Israel had already carried out.
This is PEN’s Rafah rhetorical model. Across the course of several months in 2024, President Biden had claimed Rafah was his red line, even as Israel bombed Rafah. If Israel attacked Rafah, he would end support. Israel demolished Rafah, killing, injuring, and displacing thousands of Palestinians in the process. Yet U.S. support continued. In the Rafah rhetorical model, the moral red line for U.S. or U.S.-ally violence against a dehumanized other is always in the future, even when in the present that red line is crossed repeatedly, flagrantly, and in full public view. In the process, the names of the piling dead die on PEN’s tongue.
Meanwhile, as the immoral and historically unpopular assault on Iran continues, PEN’s demonization of the enemy proceeds unabated; it has issued several more press releases and updates condemning Iranian state oppression.
In late April, after two full months of U.S. assault, PEN again singled out Iran as the height of international oppression by awarding jailed Iranian writers the Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee and Ali Asadollahi the PEN America Freedom to Write Award. This news was rebroadcast by Radio Free Europe, a U.S. state-funded propaganda channel.[10] In the weeks to come, the U.S. would deliver freedom to the villagers of Southern Iran by destroying their water sources.
Taking the broadest view of PEN’s reports, press releases, and social media posts, the majority of its international activity is focused on demonizing the U.S.’s largest strategic opponents through the liberal-imperial frame of a freedom-loving democratic U.S. versus ‘totalitarian’ states, who also happen to resist the unfettered extractive activity of U.S. capital.[11]
Rather than change direction post-2024, PEN has continued to align itself with U.S. foreign policy objectives, providing rhetorical cover for U.S. imperial carnage.
This is the double game of the liberal-imperial ideology that animates PEN: to stir up humanitarian outrage against state enemies then condemn the worst excess of wars against those state enemies but to never, ever question the war itself or humanize the writers and artists killed by the U.S. and Israel.[12] In this liberal-imperial mode, human rights are secured by killing humans, culture is protected by destroying culture. You just don’t talk about the latter.
This was all before Mengestu’s resignation. This was all while writers were normalizing relationships with PEN.
PEN may have changed its relationship to the massacres of the past in regard to Gaza. It has not changed its relationship to the massacres of the future. Under its imperial board, it never will, even as U.S.-Israeli war-making threatens to ignite the planet.
[10] PEN laments cuts to its funding: https://bsky.app/profile/penamerica.bsky.social/post/3lkhps5u5mk2h
[11] On totalitarian states: in May the U.S. increased ICE funding by $70 billion accelerate domestic ethnic cleansing.
[12] Bafflingly, the body of PEN’s belated report on Israel’s assault on Gaza’s culture does not call for an end to the occupation but rather a ceasefire and an end to the ‘war,’ as if the genocide were a symmetrical conflict. It also does not name a single slain writer or journalist in the body of the report; rather, they are consigned to an appendix. Gaza’s most famous writer, Refaat Al-Alareer, is described as a scholar in report’s main text. PEN only fully humanizes writers, featuring their faces and biographical details, when they face oppression by an enemy state.
Who Is A Writer & The Limits of Western Subjecthood
History will remember February 28, 2026 as the day the world shifted on its axis. The same day as the Minab massacre, U.S.-Israel assassinated the 86-year-old Ali Khamenei in a ‘clinical’ operation that killed several of his family members, including his infant granddaughter, Zahra Mohammadi Golpayengi, via a strike on his ‘compound.’[13] The murders galvanized Iranian resistance, further eroded U.S.-Israeli moral credibility, and shattered international conventions against assassinating heads of state. The killing of Khamenei may well prove to be the act that plunges the world into a downward escalatory spiral of military violence.
To understand PEN’s failures, let’s imagine how a vaguely humanist (not even anti-imperial or decolonial) free speech organization that insists on commenting on international affairs with a bit of spine (and unfettered from links to the military industrial complex) might have responded to the assassination of Iran’s political and spiritual leader, a voluminous author and poet.
Perhaps this organization would cast him as a complex figure, a source of spiritual guidance and political, even revolutionary clarity, across a great deal of the Islamicate world, a figure whose death was publicly mourned by millions, whose funeral was a world event. A humanist approach might also note that Khamenei opposed western colonialism and imperialism, that some of his teaching overlapped with western liberal values and some of them diverged from them quite definitively. As a political and revolutionary figure, he had blood on his hands, as do most successful revolutionaries and heads of state (certainly every U.S. president). A complex figure. Light and shadow.
But Khamenei the writer, no matter how important, is consigned, through silence upon his death, to the category of the dark other who cannot be anything but the enemy of the Western order, whose killing is not an unprecedented, world-inflaming event precipitated by two sovereigns drenched in the blood of genocide in Palestine, ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon, and war on Iran in order to maintain and expand an ethno-supremacist order Khamenei proved an obstacle to. Rather, Khamenei-the-writer’s assassination is something unremarkable to PEN (so interested in Iran), something that just so happens as the West cleans house.
Perhaps this humanist organization would comment on the writers jailed by Iran and the United States and also say that it is wrong to kill someone for their speech, no matter how powerful or powerless. Perhaps this humanist organization would also have something to say about the journalists of Lebanon. As the war on Iran captured the world’s attention, Israel conducted a ferocious assault on Southern Lebanon in which it tracked down and killed journalists. Israel killed the sibling journalists Fatima and Mohammed Ftouni, along with the iconic reporter Ali Shuaib on March 28. Weeks later, Israel killed the Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil. Khalil rescued stray cats and received visitors in a garden of citrus trees she planted with her father. Israel killed the Lebanese poet and broadcaster Khatoun Salma in her home, alongside her husband on April 2026. Israel conducted these assassinations while engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Southern Lebanon, demolishing village after village. Israel did this flush with arms from the U.S. PEN America had nothing to say about a state’s historically unprecedented violence against journalists.
This leads us back to PEN’s vexed definition of who it counts as a writer. PEN America cannot address the death or persecution of everyone oppressed for their speech in every country. Yet even after its so called about-face, it has been laser-focused on those writers persecuted by countries the U.S. is about to bomb and largely ignoring the U.S.’s partners—Israel, Germany, the U.K.—who have erected draconian discourse regimes where the law refuses to distinguish between criticism of genocide and hate speech.
Who is a writer to PEN? You are not a writer if the U.S. or Israel has killed you.
[13] ‘compound’ is orientalist for ‘home’
Publishing After PEN: A Few Notes
The U.S.-Israel nexus represents an immense source of oppression to all people of the world. Israeli drones, tested on the children of Palestine, fly over Africa. The U.S.-backed mercenary CEO Erik Prince has turned Haiti into a fiefdom, drone-bombing civilians while collecting tax revenues. In this nexus, state organizations interlink with private security and surveillance firms and transnational corporations seeking to do business in vulnerable countries and occupied territories. These security and surveillance firms sell counter-insurgency—war against the peoples of a state—as a product to western-aligned regimes in exchange for access to markets and resources.
Gaza has been the most visible sign of this global apartheid regime whose growth depends on the destruction of states and movements that resist its racial-capitalist order.[14]
As the U.S. ignites more fires via the war with Iran and begins to formally administer concentration camps for Palestinians in Gaza and migrants at home, writers cannot trust a mainstream cultural sphere that has enabled this kind of foreign and domestic state terror to meaningfully oppose it. We must abandon PEN until PEN is no more.
In a post-PEN landscape, writers and translators must seriously commit to building robust translation and publishing alternatives not just without state funding but without funding from war-state-aligned organizations. Otherwise, they will not find room to seriously challenge the state or forge transnational solidarities around writing that isn’t easily compatible with liberal-imperial ideology.
Yet writers keep dragging themselves back to PEN because PEN has money and access. In a recent conversation, a high-profile translator informed me that grants and awards from PEN are often instrumental for lesser-known translators in inking deals with Big Five publishers.
Breaking from PEN in order to break PEN means finding different ways to put resources in writers’ hands. While it is beyond my expertise to recommend one solution, I’ll end with a few thoughts:
First, if making one’s primary living from writing and translation means taking extremely dirty money and all the unspoken strictures on the content of one’s writing that entails, then writers and translators should consider how to align themselves with projects and organizations that both align with the values of transnational solidarity, abolition, and human liberation and support the cultural production of their members. Many will roll their eyes at this. But here we might point to the militant anti-apartheid South African Unions that offered cultural centers, writing workshops, stages for worker-plays, cultural festivals, and union newspapers that published union-members’ and allies’ poems. Unionized work paid the bills; the culture it fostered fortified workers’ spirits in the struggle for emancipation. What if the organizations we are a part of—that are truly fighting the good fight—also provided a home for making and sharing culture? And what if writers wrote to the struggles and desires of the people they are shoulder to shoulder with, rather than a largely hypothetical ‘national’ audience? This isn’t a point about unions in particular but about the possibility of movements and writers consciously reproducing each other. Here I’m also thinking of Toni Cade Bambara’s move from a professorship in the northeast to Atlanta to do community work as the writer-in-residence at the Neighborhood Arts Center.
Let’s also look at this from the perspective of publishers. If we’re being real, small publishers are lucky if they break even, let alone make a modest profit, making many small presses dependent on outside funding.[15] Given this, it may be useful to abandon the pretense that publishing can be a primary source of income instead of one in concert with others. This isn’t something to lament but a reality to ground different approaches. There’s a strong tradition of radical presses scaffolded by brick and mortar bookstores. These bookstores can act as more reliable sources of income, house equipment and inventory, and serve as points of distribution for their press. Ed Sanders’ Fuck You magazine was published out of his Peace Eye bookstore. The Drum & Spearbookstore anchored Drum & Spear press, which put out Enemy of the Sun, representing a point of transnational solidarity between the Black and Palestinian liberation/resistance movements. More recently, PM Press bought the last remaining used bookstore in Ithaca, New York.
In a moment of the increased criminalization of speech and literature that has closed many spaces like universities from currents of liberatory thought, bookstores have also acted as strongholds of social movement organizing. They have also traditionally acted as covert distribution points (below/behind the counter) of criminalized literature. In the years to come, this may be particularly necessary for titles too dangerous in the eyes of a wildly paranoid state for publishers to list online or for readers to have appear in their search histories or delivered to their homes. Merging the activities of publishing with physical spaces responsive to the surrounding communities is a promising alternative to grant-chasing, gala-fundraising model of genocide-washing NGOs like PEN, which fundamentally depend on keeping in the good graces of millionaires and deep-pocketed foundations.
Further, in this moment in which not only the browsing and purchase of digital texts but digital reading itself is highly surveilled, down to the second, there’s something to say about the role of small press print culture at the ground-floor of liberation—liberation of the mind. To read print, for your attention to be unsurveilled, is also, as Matt Seybold argues, a rent strike against surveillance capital and the massively consumptive computing infrastructures it relies upon. Would you feel more comfortable—more free—reading Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature in a hard copy that lives in your bag or through digital software, where your activity becomes both monetizable data in possession of a tech goliath and a record of potential evidence against you by this rapidly Red-Scarifying state?
If the problem of the PEN model of funding is that these organizations reflect the priorities of their elite boards, state ties, and funding sources, presses can renew their exploration of from-below funding models. With few exceptions, literary publishing has not caught up to the crowd funding models that have floated several of your favorite podcasts for years. There are also sturdy funding models that can continue to refurbished, including direct subscriptions to presses. And, as the editor of this article reminded me, buying books is a form of crowdfunding. I’ll add that buying books from insurgent presses in social reading contexts—sharing books, discussion groups, political education groups—amplifies our capacity to create cultures beyond the liberal imperial one PEN seeks to maintain.
Finally, I would like to point out that at this moment in the United States, where moral crime is frequently made law, the gap between legality and morality has never been so stark. As repression ratchets up, we should not disqualify funding sources or expression that run afoul of the current legal regime. If certain forms of expression are made illegal and printing, funding, or distributing those becomes something along the lines of ‘material support to terrorism,’ then there may need to be a necessary consonance between extra-legal funding and extra-legal expression—expression which is still necessary, lawful or not. This means expanding the definition of who is a writer, publisher, and distributor and going to bat for those people when they face persecution, rather than shrinking these categories for the sake of respectability. For instance, PEN, our free speech champ, has been silent on the Prairieland 19, some of whom received life-destroying, decades-long federal prison sentences for making and transporting zines. It is time to bring these writers, publishers, and distributors from the margins of our attention to the center. PEN never will.
Above all, this is not a call to disorganize as we walk away from organizations like PEN. The problem with PEN is that it was taking the desire for an organization like it to exist and bending that energy to imperial purposes. Rather, we needto approach forming alternative writers organizations with internationalist dimensions with a renewed sense of rigor, patience, and seriousness of purpose. Whatever comes after PEN should looking nothing like PEN. Whoever is involved should look nothing like PEN’s board or leadership. Some experiments will fail. Some will succeed. Either way, this moment calls for a decisive realignment of our activities and methods as cultural workers to fight U.S.- and Israel-led global apartheid. There’s less time and little excuse to be fooled again.
[14] For an analysis of Israeli-based security, surveillance, and weapons companies on the global stage and the term “global apartheid,” see Kambale Musavali, “From the River to the Rift: The Global Struggle for Self-Determination in Palestine and Congo.” Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation & Liberation (Pluto Press, 2026).
[15] In a recent fundraising email, Ugly Duckling Presse noted that “book sales make up one-third of UDP’s budget, but book production accounts for more than one-third of our expenditure.”
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Joe Hall is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Buffalo Free Rapid Transit (Black Ocean, 2026). Hall has performed and delivered talks nationally at bars, squats, universities, and rivers. Protean, Postcolonial Studies, mercury firs, Best Buds! Collective, dollar bills, and an NFTA bus shelter have all featured his writing. In Buffalo, he has taught community-based poetry workshops for teachers, teens, and workers.