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Richard Hoffman moderates a panel discussion about the forces in the world of publishing, society at large, and our own psyches that work to silence "risky writing".

The importance of politically challenging fiction and poetry throughout history is undeniable: from Turgenev's powerful A Sportsman's Notebook, which prompted Czar Alexander II to become the first world leader to free his country's slaves, to the Lost Generation's opposition to fascism; from Ginsburg's Howl to Doris Lessing's fiction to James Baldwin's powerful and incisive essays.

Has such writing been effectively denied its audience in our day? To what extent are the barriers to risky or oppositional writing real or imagined? What are the long-term societal and cultural dangers of a safe literature, of books as mere entertainment or escape? And what are the individual author and the reader hungry for substance, to do?

PEN New England's Freedom-to-Write (FTW) Committee, in partnership with the Cambridge Forum, hosts a panel discussion about the forces in the world of publishing, society at large, and our own psyches that work to silence "risky writing," the most dangerous but often most important of an author's works. The panel, moderated by Richard Hoffman, poet, fiction writer, and author of the memoir Half the House, features Carole Horne, General Manager, Harvard Book Store; Linda McCarriston, professor of creative writing and literary arts at the University of Alaska; Mark Pawlak, poet and editor of Hanging Loose Press; and Jill Petty, editor and small press publisher.