What I Have Learned from Exiled Journalists

Anneli Andre-Barrett is a senior volunteer for the PEN Canada Writers in Exile (WiE) community, a Refugee Integration Mentor, and Skills Development Team member of Ontario’s Private Refugee Sponsor Network …

Toward a Practice of Collectivity

Toward a Practice of Collectivity By El Jones The following essay appears in Abolitionist Intimacies, and is reprinted with the permission of Fernwood Publishing. It is the summer of 2020, …

Q&A with 2022 New Voices Award Winner Fareh Malik

Fareh Malik is a spoken word poet from Hamilton, Ontario and the winner of the 2022 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. His new book Streams that Lead Somewhere is available from Mawenzi Press. In its citation the New Voices Award jury praised Malik’s “tenderness and throat-grabbing use of imagery” and his “wide range of voices and tones to convey a nuanced spectrum of emotions and a laser sharp critique of Canada’s blatant and covert systemic racism.”

Seeking Justice for Dawit Isaak

Dawit Isaak and his colleagues are the longest detained journalists in the world today.  September 23, 2022 will mark 21 years of detention. Their cases and causes are not only heartbreaking and egregiously unjust, but emblematic of the global assault on media freedom by authoritarian regimes, which continues to intensify under the cover of a global pandemic of impunity.

Q&A with Amber Bracken, Canadian photojournalist and 2022 Ken Filkow Prize winner

Amber Bracken is a Canadian photojournalist who has reported extensively on the impacts of colonization, often affecting Indigenous peoples in North America. PEN Canada awarded her the 2022 Ken Filkow Prize for her courageous coverage of  the 2021 coastal pipeline protests on Wetʼsuwetʼen First Nation territory in British Columbia. Bracken has also won the Contemporary Issues category of the 2017 World Press Photo awards and in 2022 won the overall World Press Photo of the Year.