Obama, Patti Smith among PEN America honorees

Artists, activists and a former president gared online for PEN America's annual gala, held virtually this year because of pandemic.

Those hored by literary and human rights organization included Chinese organizer and dissident Xu Zhiyong; Darnella Frazier, teenr who taped death of George Floyd at hands of Minneapolis police; and Marie Yovavitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was a key witness during impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Meryl Streep, Spike Lee, Bo and Emma Thompson were among celebrities offering tributes to Tuesday night's award winners.

Hearst executive vice chairman Frank A. Bennack Jr. was this year's Corporate Horee. PEN also presented a literary service prize to Patti Smith, who sang ballad "Build a Peaceable Kingdom," and Voice of Influence Award to former President Barack Obama, whose memoir “A Promised Land” came out last month. In a taped conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning historian and former PEN president Ron Cherw, Obama said that advocacy of PEN and or organizations influenced him as president.

“I was consistently raising issues of jailed journalists, jailed dissidents, censorship issues, freedom of press issues in conversations that I would have,” he said. “re were a number of occasions where, as a consequence of us being aware of plight of a journalist or a dissident, a human rights activist, that making it onto nda of a conversation that I had, that it ended up resulting in somebody’s freedom.”

Im credits: AP