PEN AMERICA PRESENTS: THE FREEDOM TO READ & WRITE

BEN FOUNTAIN is a former practicing attorney and the author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award; and Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. His latest book, Devil Makes Three: A Novel (Flatiron Books), is a tale of greed and American complicities in Haiti.

OREN J. TEICHER worked on behalf of the nation's independent booksellers for more than 30 years, retiring as CEO of the American Booksellers Association at the end of 2019. While at ABA, he helped found the American Booksellers for Free Expression and was engaged in multiple First Amendment battles as its media coalition chair. He served as a trustee of his local library in White Plains, New York, and is currently serving as a board member at the National Coalition Against Censorship. Teicher was named Publishers Weekly Person of the Year in 2013 and in 2019 was awarded the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for outstanding service to the American literary community.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, RENEE O’CONNOR moved with her family to Miami when she was 6 years old, and later became a first-generation college graduate when she earned a degree in international affairs – and a minor in Black studies – from Florida State University. After a successful career in the hospitality industry, she started her own business and ran a dance company for five years before pivoting again after hearing former President Barack Obama speak about the state of public education in America. Her interest captured, she began doing research and discovered that the statistics, particularly for Black and brown kids in public school, were dismal. Soon after, she applied and was accepted to the Teach For America program and was placed at Miami Norland Senior High School 13 years ago. In October 2023 she traveled with the Community Justice Project to Geneva to testify before the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at the United Nations during its review of the United States Human Rights contract. She spoke directly to the ICC on the ways in which she believes the state of Florida is infringing upon its citizens’ freedom of expression, in particular teachers who teach African American history.

SUZANNE NOSSEL is the chief executive officer of PEN America and the author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Since joining PEN in 2013, she's doubled its staff, budget, and membership; spearheaded a unification with PEN Center USA in Los Angeles as well as the establishment of a Washington, D.C., office; and overseen groundbreaking work on free expression in Hong Kong and China, Myanmar, Eurasia, and the United States. A leading voice on the subject in the U.S. and globally, she writes and is frequently interviewed about free expression issues for national and international media outlets. She is a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other outlets, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Democracy, and other journals. She served on the board of directors of the Tides Foundation until 2021, and is a former senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Council on Foreign Relations.