In 2016, Adalah-NY, a grassroots organization arguing for a boycott of Israel due to what it sees as an apartheid regime “founded as a Jewish state on land ethnically cleansed of its indigenous Palestinian population,” criticized PEN for accepting Israeli sponsorship for its World Voices Festival this past May. (Nossel said PEN has been receiving “minor”support from Israel since roughly 2006, before she took charge.)

More than 150 artists, authors, and cultural figures have banded together to urge Israel to release Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian poet, from house arrest. Tatour was charged with incitement to violence on October 11 for publishing her work on social media, including a poem titled “Resist My People, Resist Them” (“Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum”) that was posted on YouTube.

Major literary figures are among more than 150 writers urging Israel to release Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who has been under house arrest since January for a poem she wrote.

They include such renowned international novelists, playwrights and poets as Alice Walker, Edwidge Danticat, Eve Ensler, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Fady Joudah, Tayari Jones, Dale Peck, Russell Banks, Jorie Graham and Dave Eggers.

More than 150 literary figures, including nine Pulitzer Prize winners, are calling for Israel to free an Israeli-Arab poet charged with inciting violence through social media.

The open letter announced Tuesday in support of Dareen Tatour, who has been under house arrest since October, was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and Adalah-NY (The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel). Authors Alice Walker, Claudia Rankine and Dave Eggers were among those who signed on in asserting “poetry is not a crime.”