The PEN America World Voices Festival is the premier celebration of writing from the United States and around the world.

Schedule of Events:

May 11, 2024

7:00 PM – 8:30 PM: “A self is a fold of forces”: Poetics of the human and more-than-human at The Preserve
“The purpose of poetry,” Czes?aw Mi?osz wrote, “is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person.” The lifeblood of every ecosystem is diversity and interdependence. Just as no organism is separate from all other organisms, no idea is unconnected to all other ideas. None of us live or think alone—what a relief! How good, how essential it feels to be held by a strong web of minds and hearts, to be part of a living system. Poets Amy Gerstler and Daniela Naomi Molnar write by incorporating multiple voices, including the voices of both humans and other-than-humans in their work. Moderated by literary curator Louise Steinman, these polyvocal poets will read their own and others’ poems and talk about what it means to write poetry in our current cultural moment, and why it takes a chorus to sing one’s sensibilities.
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May 15, 2024

7:00 PM – 8:30 PM: Los Angeles Latinidad: Past, Present, and Future at The Preserve
Preeminent writers and historians explore the past, present, and future of Latinidad in Los Angeles. A leading scholar of race, immigration, and mass incarceration, author Kelly Lytle Hernández offers illuminating insights into the history of race, politics, and the borderlands. Historian George J. Sanchez, renowned for his scholarly work on race, labor, and migration, is an expert on under-known histories of ethnic interaction in 20th-century Los Angeles. Joined by Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Héctor Tobar, these three luminaries will discuss the possibilities and paradoxes of the 20th and 21st-century Latino experience in the City of Angels.
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May 17, 2024

7:00 PM – 8:30 PM: Love in the Big City at The Preserve
Author Sang Young Park joins PEN America World Voices Festival following the publication of his Booker-Prize nominated English-language debut, _Love in the Big City, _translated from Korean by PEN/Heim Translation Awardee Anton Hur. Discussing his best-selling novel chronicling the joy and loneliness of millennial life in Seoul, Park will be joined by Rex Ogle, a prolific and award-winning author of nearly a hundred children’s books, comics, graphic novels, and memoirs set across the United States. Join us for a reading and conversation in two languages as Park and Ogle read and discuss contemporary queer fiction across time and place.
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May 18, 2024

7:00 PM - 8:30 PM: Up-Ending Narratives at The Preserve
With his new work, You Dream of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue turns the historical novel upside down and inside-out, adding a dose of hallucinogens to the morning in 1519, when the conquistador Hernán Cortés enters Tenochititlan (present-day Mexico City) to meet Moctezuma. In his new novel, James, Percival Everett rewrites Mark Twain’s notorious novel to let us hear the enslaved Jim’s point of view, finally giving “one of the noblest characters in American literature a novel worthy of him.” Both of these retellings offer remarkable revelations; funny and horrifying meditations on history real and imagined; as well as characters we think we know—shown in a radically new light.
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2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Haunted Territory: The Weight of History at The Wende Museum
Jenny Erpenbeck’s childhood, she has commented, “belongs in a museum.” Born in the now-defunct GDR; she was twenty-two and in university when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. In her most recent novel, Kairos, Erpenbeck narrates two breakups: one romantic, one political. An intense and formative relationship collapses, like the GDR, leaving behind a narrative ruin. In Go, Went, Gone (2015), she centers her novel on the moral question of asylum, through an encounter between a privileged German citizen and a small group of displaced African refugees. Erpenbeck, an epic storyteller and one of the most celebrated authors in Germany, discusses her work with novelist Charmaine Craig at the Wende Museum, whose mission is to explore the complicated legacy of the Cold War and its relevance to contemporary social and political issues. Co-presented by Wende Museum and Villa Aurora.
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Date and Time:
May 11, 2024 from 7:00pm to 8:30pm
May 15, 2024 from 7:00pm to 8:30pm
May 17, 2024 from 7:00pm to 8:30pm
May 18, 2024 from 2:00pm to 3:30pm
May 18, 2024 from 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Location:
The Preserve, 1370 N St Andrews Pl,
Los Angeles, CA 90028

The Wende Museum, 10808 Culver Blvd,
Culver City, CA 90230

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