The PEN/Bare Life Review Grants
Announcing the 2025 Grantees
Judges: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, Ahmed Naji, Ofelia Montelongo, Achiro Olwoch
L Vocem, The Air Beneath Her Feet
The Air Beneath Her Feet is a powerful exploration of displacement, survival, and the precarious reality of living in exile. Though taking place during the first Trump presidency, its themes remain profoundly relevant today, capturing the fear, uncertainty, and resilience of immigrants navigating hostile systems. With prose that is deceptively simple yet deeply deliberate, the piece carries immense emotional weight, drawing the reader into the ongoing struggles of those forced to leave home. It is a story that pulses with urgency, refusing to be merely an intellectual or artistic exercise – it bears witness to the prolonged survival of the displaced. The work’s commitment to language as a cultural anchor is particularly striking, as the writer insists on making it available not only in English but also in Spanish, recognizing the over eight million Venezuelans living in the U.S., Europe, and South America. This decision speaks to the power of language as both a claim to identity and an act of resistance against erasure. The piece’s clarity of purpose, its ability to articulate both the hope and despair of being caught between catastrophe and catastrophe. More than just a depiction of struggle, The Air Beneath Her Feet insists on being heard, offering a raw and unflinching look at the realities of displacement in a world where true safety remains elusive.
María Isabel Álvarez, All the Ways We Ached for Home
This collection of stories is a deeply nuanced exploration of Guatemalan identity, generational trauma, and the search for belonging. Through precise, evocative prose, María Isabel weaves together narratives that transcend stereotypes, allowing her characters to exist with agency, longing, and joy while navigating the lingering effects of civil war. The collection captures the quiet resilience of motherhood and the interwoven struggles of immigrants, offering a stereotype-free portrayal of Guatemalan life. The book’s ability to balance vulnerability and resilience, illustrating how displacement and inherited trauma shape the human experience. One sentence, in particular, stands out: “Papi wasn’t born sad; he’d earned the right to feel melancholy. Images from Guatemala’s Civil War had seared into his cellular memory, so that wherever he walked, death walked with him.” This haunting line encapsulates the deep scars of war and exile, reinforcing how the collection is not only a reflection on loss, but also a testament to survival, memory, and the enduring ache for home.
Publishers, agents, and editors who wish to learn more about these projects are invited to contact the PEN America Literary Awards team at awards@pen.org.
Past Grantees
2024
Chibuike Ogbonnaya, The Miraculous Wonders of Love
A collection of variety and breadth, The Miraculous Wonders of Love explores the experiences of transgender characters in religious spaces, focusing on Christianity and Igbo Traditional religion. In these stories, Ogbonnaya resists reductive narratives about Nigerian LGBTQ experiences, and centers trans and gender non-conforming people making space for themselves in unlikely places. Innovative, tender, and heartbreaking, this collection expands what it means to be an LGBTQ immigrant, and pushes us away from the binaries of gender, tradition, and faith. Ogbonnaya’s stories and prose are a necessary addition to the rich tradition of Nigerian letters—a testament that LGBTQ stories and spirituality can go hand in hand.
Doua Thao, An Americans
The lyrical and rugged collide in Doua Thao’s An Americans, a novel that explores the voices of a Hmong refugee community in the Midwest. As characters navigate their place in the new American world to forge themselves anew post the Laotian Secret War, the novel explores the fractures and the limits of community living. The old ways haunt the new in growing tensions between the old and young, between those that take on the new religion and those who cling to the customs of the past while struggling to eke a living amongst existing communities with their own tribal values. Following the perspectives of different community members, the novel forces us to ask: when we move to a new place, across short and long distances, what parts of us do we keep, and what parts of us do we forfeit? Thao’s prose is an instant classic.
The PEN/Bare Life Review Grants support literary works in progress by immigrant and refugee writers, recognizing that the literature of migration is of inherent and manifest value. Beginning in 2024, PEN America will confer two PEN/Bare Life Review Grants of $5,000 each to writers of fiction or poetry.
Some supporters have asked about the nature and status of our partnership with PEN America in light of the boycott and cancellation of the 2024 World Voices Festival and Literary Awards Ceremony.
First, and above all, The Bare Life Review mourns the dead, grieves with the displaced, and condemns the ongoing, criminal violence in Gaza. We join the international call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
At the outset of the war, and the response for which PEN has received just reproof, hundreds of writers had already submitted their work for the 2024 grants cycle. We made the decision to proceed with consideration of their manuscripts, and with the 2025 cycle (underway now), rather than suspend the grants with no prospect of re-launching on a similar timeline. We continue to assess the relationship.
Sales of back-issues of The Bare Life Review do not benefit PEN America in any way. Nor do past subscriptions or donations. All proceeds benefit Intersection for the Arts, a San Francisco-based 501(c)3 organization.