NEW YORK (AP) — This year’s PEN America Literary Gala will be notable for the presence of “Saturday Night Live.”

PEN, the literary and free expression organization, is giving “SNL” creator-executive Lorne Michaels its PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, which in previous years has gone to Toni Morrison, Stephen Sondheim and Patti Smith among others. The May 18 event will be hosted by Colin Jost, the longtime “SNL” writer and “Weekend Update” co-anchor.

In a statement given to The Associated Press, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said Michaelsí “unique brand of uproarious and fearless political and social sketches forever changed television and comedy.”

“The political landscape wouldn’t be the same without SNL to offer up a weekly skewering of a hapless cast of characters from the halls of power in Washington — a merry time capsule of what gave us joy and jitters in moments of national exhilaration and peril,” she said.

The PEN gala will be at its longtime venue, the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

PEN announced it also will honor Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer and co-CEO, who will receive the Business Visionary Award because of “the transformative impact of Netflix on storytelling, society at large, and on book adaptations as a critical source of content.”

Sarandos already is well known in the “SNL” community: Netflix landed the 2015 coming-of-age comedy “Staten Island Summer,” produced by Michaels and written by Jost.

Michaels, 78, has been overseeing SNL since it first aired in 1975, aside from a few seasons in the 1980s. The show helped launched the careers of Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy and many others stars, and has included Jost, Tina Fey and Seth Meyers among its head writers. Michaels has previously received a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.