NEW YORK—When Francine Prose agreed a year ago to serve as president of the American center of PEN, the international writers organization, her excitement at taking the job was weighted slightly by concerns she wouldn't have time for other projects.
Prose, who runs unopposed for a second one-year term as PEN American members meet this week to select a president for 2008, has finished a novel that comes out this fall and has started another book. She read hundreds of works as a judge for the National Book Awards and enjoyed time with her baby granddaughter.
"If I didn't get to something, it wasn't PEN's fault," Prose, whose novels include "Blue Angel" and "A Changed Man," said with a laugh during a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Prose, 59, said her biggest goal for PEN next year is increasing involvement in Readers & Writers, a program that sends authors to visit schools and community centers. She notes that PEN has "this huge labor pool of writers and since we know that funding for the arts has been cut back, I really want to improve and revitalize our writers in the school program."
PEN (which, roughly, stands for Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists) was founded in London in 1921, in the aftermath of World War I, with the "unshakable conviction that if the writers of the world could learn to stretch out their hands to each other, the nations of the world could learn in time to do the same." The American Center was started a year later.
Membership in the PEN American Center is up from just under 2,800 in 2001 to nearly 3,330 in 2008. As she noted upon becoming president in 2007, Prose says that since Sept. 11, 2001, and the passing of the Patriot Act, the organization has been paying more attention to human rights in the United States.
"In 2002, 2003, 2004, there was a huge self-censorship," she says. "I kept hearing stories about things people wouldn't write because it wouldn't get published or things being rejected for being too opinionated.
"I think that's changed. Now, there's a popular feeling against the war and a growing sense our own government has been less than forthright. But it shows how readily we could go from a climate in which we feel that we had freedom to a climate where we didn't."
