PEN World Voices Festival 🪶 🇦🇷 🇨🇴 🇩🇴 🇪🇨 🇭🇳 🇲🇽 🇵🇪 🇵🇷 🇹🇹 🇺🇾
International literature conference
140 writers from 40 countries
Caribbean Solidarity and Latin American Women’s Perspectives
Multiple venues in Greenwich Village, NYC
Apr 29 – May 2, Wed-Sat
It’s a great place to discover new authors who will make you proud to be whatever you are.
Look for the “Unbannable Library” public art installation of banned Latinx books in Union Square on April 30, and in Washington Square Park on May 2. Banning books is something the Nazis did. It has no place in America. People who can’t control themselves waste a lot of energy trying to control everybody else.
Latins at PEN World Voices Festival 2026
Agustina Bazterrica (“Tender is the Flesh”) 🇦🇷
Carmen Boulloso 🇲🇽
Álvaro Enrigue (“Sudden Death”) 🇲🇽
Reyna Grande “The Distance Between Us” 🇲🇽
Mónica Ojeda Andean horror stories 🇪🇨
María Ospina 🇨🇴
Gabriela Wiener 🇵🇪
Caribbean Solidarity: Story, Song, and Protest
This is largely about the construction of identity through writing.
– Angie Cruz (“How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water”) 🇩🇴
– Saraciea Fennell, Bronx Book Festival Executive Director 🇭🇳 🪶 (Garifuna)
– Justin Haynes (“Ibis”) 🇹🇹
– Esmeralda Santiago (“Las Madres”) ~ Apr 29, Wed 🇵🇷
It’s an interesting personal topic. I’m a multiracial, multicultural American who writes about Latin culture in English, but lives in Spanish full time in a Spanish-speaking country, with my Latin family. Writing, drumming, singing, and dancing in the Latin world for over 20 years has changed my identity from gringo to some kind of gringotino. I’ve become my work.
Identity has multiple moving parts:
It gets complicated for multicultural people because our heritage cultures are often antagonistic, so we learn to code switch.
It’s sad that America, a country of immigrants, turned antagonistic towards perceived “others.” It doesn’t matter if you’ve been American for generations. This antagonism actually creates the “other.” Without it we would just be Americans without hyphens.
Being blocked from full participation in society causes an identity crisis. That’s part of the abuser’s game, to upset and confuse you, so they can make money off you, while your head is spinning around your identity. We have to define ourselves and not let others define us. Writing is a good way to do that.
New York is complicated too, because we have an identity where we are from, and another in New York. Since people come and go, many of us also have a New Yorker identity in diaspora. You have different identities before, during, and after your New York life.
One of the great things about being an ex-New Yorker is that you think faster, work faster, and are more productive that most people around the world. Unfortunately, people may not understand your New York intensity. It creates conflicts out in the world.
Bold Voices: Latin American Writers in Conversation
Women’s perspectives on rights, violence, and environmental and political corruption.
– Guadalupe Nettel (“The Accidentals”) 🇲🇽
– Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (“The Girl From the Orange Grove”) 🇦🇷
– Fernanda Trías (“Pink Slime”) 🇺🇾
This is important because one of the things I learned in the last 20 years is that women are the guardians of culture.