Sarah Jessica Parker will be this year's recipient of PEN America's "Literary Service Award." The "Sex and the City" star, a longtime advocate for reading and literacy, will be honored May 15 at the free expression organization's annual spring gala.
Jon Yaged, CEO of Macmillan Publishers , will receive the "Business Visionary Award."
Parker has been involved in numerous literary projects, whether as founder of her own publishing imprint or serving as executive producer of the anti-book banning documentary "The Librarians," which premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival .
The PEN/Audible Literary Service Award had previously been given to an "important writer" who has attracted a wide audience and "helped us understand the human condition," with previous winners including Stephen Sondheim and Toni Morrison. The criteria is now "a writer or advocate who has served the literary community through their words or work."
"We are now at a crisis point with books by underrepresented writers being pulled from school libraries and classrooms," PEN co-CEO Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf said in a statement released Friday. "Sarah Jessica Parker is pushing back against these bans as an indispensable defender of the freedom to read and by shining a light on exceptional new voices of American contemporary literature through her publishing imprint SJP Lit."
