Join the Skirball Cultural Center and PEN America to celebrate the release of Ilan Stavan’s The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language. Chart how individuals have shaped American English in inventive and culturally specific ways during an evening of performance featuring poets, musicians, essayists, and beyond.

Featured speakers and performers include:

• Los Angeles Times writer Gustavo Arellano
• Former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles Jessica Kim
• Poet Alyesha Wise

Plus, more to be announced!
 

About the Book

This volume is a people’s history of English in the United States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers, immigrants, scholars, students, musicians, and so many others. It is organized chronologically and offers a banquet of letters, poems, essays, dictionary entries, stories, songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation.

Our linguistic and cultural multiplicity has sparked fierce national debates that play out in these pages—from the compulsory education (and deracination) of Native Americans, to the classification of Black Vernacular English (once celebrated and ridiculed as Ebonics), to the dictionary wars over prescriptive versus descriptive usage, to the push for “English only” mandates that persist to this day. What is clear is that as much as we try to corral it, American English gallops ahead to its own destiny. 
 

“The shrewdly selected offerings capture the kaleidoscopic variety of American English and attest to its power in shaping national identity. The result is a trenchant look at a nation perpetually in the process of making itself.”—Publishers Weekly