On March 2, the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards were held at The Town Hall in New York City. The evening, which was hosted by Kal Penn, paid tribute to Tina Fey, Vinod Kumar Shukla, and Erika Dickerson-Despenza with career achievement awards, and also bestowed 11 book awards upon recipients including Percival Everett, Judith Thurman, and Eve Fairbanks.

The evening, which marked the 100th year of PEN, which champions free speech and liberty for writers around the world, opened with a performance by Solea Pfieffer, and also featured musical numbers from Bobby Conte, and Lilsi LaFontaine. Speaking on the momentous nature of the evening, PEN America President Ayad Akhtar said, “For the past 100 years, we’ve worked to defend the rights of writers to imagine, and speak, to create freely. As we look ahead to the next hundred years, our mission is fueled by new urgency. Alarming attempts to use the power of the state to ban ideas, and the books that contain them, have proliferated in this country, and we are also battling a dwindling space of civil exchange – and a growing belief on all sides of the political spectrum, that the harms of speech hold an equal or even greater claim on us than the freedom to speak.”