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PEN Center USA will have old friend Harrison Ford present its lifetime achievement award to Joan Didion at the group's October dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ford and Didion have apparently known each other since he built her beach house in 1971, in his carpenter days before "American Graffiti" or "Star Wars." Other winners include journalist Chris Hedges, who will receive the First Amendment award, and the group's Award of Honor to Kickstarter founders Perry Chen, Charles Adler and Yancey Strickler. Mark Boal will get the screenplay award for “Zero Dark Thirty” and Danny Strong the teleplay award for “Game Change.” Seth Rosenfeld get the prize in research nonfiction for his book, “Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power.”
This is cool: Ed Leibowitz wins the prize in journalism for The Takeover Artist, his Los Angeles Magazine profile of LAUSD superintendent John Deasy. The story ran in the magazine last September. Leibowitz's wife, Mary Melton, previously won the PEN Center prize for a story in the magazine on the photographer Julius Shulman. Melton is now the editor of Los Angeles, of course.
