PEN/Open Book (known as the Beyond Margins Award through 2009) is a program intended to foster racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities, and works to establish access for diverse literary groups to the publishing industry. Created in 1991 by the PEN American Center, the PEN/Open Book program ensures custodians of language and literature are representative of the American people.
The Committee discusses mutual concerns and strategies for advancing writing and professional activities, and coordinates Open Book events. While multiple awards were presented in previous years, the PEN Open Book Award now presents one award every year to books published in the United States (but without citizenship or residency requirements) by "authors of color who have not received wide media coverage".
The award is one of many PEN awards sponsored by International PEN affiliates in over 145 PEN centers around the world. The PEN American Center awards have been characterized as being among the "major" American literary prizes.
Read more about PEN/Open Book: List of Winners and Runner-ups
Famous quotes containing the words pen, open and/or book:
“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.”
—Max Beerbohm (1872–1956)
“Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,—why the judge does not dismiss his case,—why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)