Romaissaa Benzizoune
English PEN
London, England
In this blog post, I will discuss some of the more miscellaneous support work I did for English PEN, outside of the Lady Chatterley trial. For example, I sometimes helped Marion and the rest of the team facilitate events, including a panel focused on publishing laws. When an event happens, it’s an all-ten-hands-on-deck situation. Additionally, I tagged along for significant meetings when possible.
In one meeting that I shadowed, I heard about a literacy project that the Turkish Publishers Association aims to take to Turkish suburbs. Will shared some of English PEN’s common practices and shared suggestions and advice, and it was really interesting to witness this transnational thoughts-sharing. In another, I learned about Cameroon’s repressive crackdown on journalists, and how colonial divisions of the land (between UK and France) directly correlate to modern-day divisions and struggles. Generally, I became aware of a variety of struggles mostly ignored by American media.
Most of my work, though, was with Cat and the Writers at Risk Program. Some of my tasks were more traditionally intern-y, but even those felt significant. For example, I updated a calendar with the birthdays, incarceration dates, and sentencing dates of imprisoned author-activists so that they could be used for social media initiatives and anniversary commemorations.
Most of my tasks were not intern-y: I tagged along to events and protests, supported daily tasks when needed, drafted significant campaigning tweets, and helped with an exciting unannounced project that should be launched next year.
In my next and last blog post, I will discuss the writing portion of the work I did with English PEN, which proved to be my most valuable contribution and my favorite part of my summer experience.
Until then!