The 58th annual PEN Literary Awards were held March 2 at the Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, awarding more than $350,000 in prizes to writers, editors, and translators. The ceremony was hosted by Kal Penn, who in his opening remarks noted that this year marked the centennial of PEN America's founding. He stressed that the organization's mission is just as important day as it was 100 years ago, and set the tone for the evening with topical jokes about book bans and the recent controversies surrounding Roald Dahl, Scott Adams, and J.K. Rowling.

Among the 17 literary awards and grants presented throughout the evening, the biggest winner was Percival Everett, who received the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for his novel Dr. No (Graywolf Press), about a professor of mathematics who researches "nothingness" and the aspiring supervillain who attempts to recruit him. In his acceptance speech, Everett thanked Graywolf, which he said he has been with for the past 29 years, during which time he has "had one editor: Fiona McCrae." (McCrae retired last summer.)

The night's other major winners were Morgan Talty, whose Night of the Living Rez (Tin House Books) won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Story Collection, and Judith Thurman, whose essay collection A Left-Handed Woman (FSG) won the $15,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Other winners include Hafizah Augustus Geter, whose memoir The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin (Random House) won the Open Book Award for authors of color; Oscar Hokeah, whose Calling for a Blanket Dance (Algonquin) won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel; Eve Fairbanks, whose The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning (S&S) won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; and Florence Williams, whose Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey (Norton) won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. All four awards come with $10,000 purses.

Dan Charnas's Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (MCD) received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and Robin Coste Lewis's To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf) won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection. Both awards come with $5,000 purses.

In the awards' two translation categories Tiffany Tsao won the $3,000 PEN Translation Prize for her translation of People from Bloomington by Budi Darma (Penguin Classics), and Daniel Borzutzky won the $3,000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of The Loose Pearl by Paula Ilabaca Nuñez (Coimpress). Actor, author, and translator Molly Ringwald presented Borzutzky with his award; "I can't believe you're a translator!" Borzutzky remarked to Ringwald. "I feel like my entire childhood is redefined to find out that Molly Ringwald is a translator."

Morgan Talty, Oscar Hokeah, and Tiffany Tsao were unable to attend the ceremony, so Tin House publisher Craig Popelars, Algonquin associate publisher Michael McKenzie, and Penguin Classics publisher Elda Rotor accepted the authors' respective awards on their behalf.

Indian writer Vinod Kumar Shukla, who also could not attend the ceremony, was awarded the $50,000 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, recognizing his novels, poetry, and short stories in Hindi and in translation. Scholar-playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza won $10,000 the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award; actor Lizan Mitchell performed a selection from Dickerson-Despenza's play shadow/land.

Writer, actor, comedian, and playwright Tina Fey was awarded the $25,000 PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. Actor, comedian, and writer Rachel Dratch introduced the award, fondly recalling her early days working with Fey in the Chicago improv comedy scene in the mid-nineties. In her acceptance speech, Fey said it was an honor to be recognized "by this organization that does so much to protect free expression and journalistic freedom," and admitted she was intimated to be in a room with what she jokingly called "all these proper writers."