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We are programming the 2026 festival amid visible geopolitical instability. The postwar architecture of rights and norms, always compromised, always selectively applied, is currently being dismantled by its architects. And as people across the world grapple with fracturing democracies, mass displacement, and technological acceleration, our 2026 program has been designed to make these pressures intelligible and therefore contestable. We believe a lot of these challenges must be tackled at communal and local levels, where imagination must meet material conditions.

The Village in the Book is NYBALF 2026’s organizing theme. What do writers owe the communities that animate their work?

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The village, as we use it here, is the unit of proximity. The neighborhood, the city, the region, the language community, the congregation, the political commons we cannot psychologically exit.

For writers who live and work out of their own countries, this proximity is literal. The satirist in Harare, the journalist in Tijuana, the novelist in Brooklyn, must weigh every sentence against the fact that they will still be there when the reaction comes. For writers in the diaspora, the questions are different but no less serious. Does distance disqualify? Does safety create obligation? When you write home from elsewhere, who are you addressing, and on whose terms?
 

These tensions are not unique to Black and African literary life, but they are felt with particular intensity within it. The legacies of extraction, displacement, and the uneven architecture of the global publishing industry mean that the relationship between writer and place has never been neutral in these traditions.

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For much of the twentieth century, the major works of African literature were published in London, Paris, and New York. The languages in which they were written, the audiences they were edited for, the prizes that validated them, and the economies that sustained them were, in most cases, located elsewhere. Writers who wished to be read beyond their borders often had to leave or write as though they already had. This produced extraordinary literature, but it also produced a structural distance between the writer and the community that appeared in the work.

Caribbean literature carries a parallel inheritance, written across empires, languages, waters, and frequently toward metropolitan audiences whose interest was never guaranteed and never unconditional. For Black American writers, the question takes a different but related shape. The Great Migration, the long exclusion from publishing infrastructure, and the persistent gatekeeping of whose stories count as universal have meant that proximity to one's own community has always been something to be fought for.

What connects these histories is a shared condition. The terms on which Black and African writers encounter their own localities have rarely been set by those localities themselves. That condition is not only historical. It persists in the economics of contemporary publishing, in the visa regimes that determine which writers can freely travel and which cannot, in the algorithms that shape what gets read and by whom, and in the quiet consolidation of literary attention around a shrinking number of global cities. But the most pressing questions of today are local.
 

Who controls the resources a community generates? Who has access to the intellectual and material infrastructure needed to build a durable life? Whose interests does local governance actually serve? Decades of structural adjustment, extractive investment, and the steady migration of talent and capital toward a handful of global cities have left local economies at ‘home’ underdeveloped, and ‘local’ institutions and infrastructure abroad overstretched.
 

In making these inquiries, we turn our attention, this year, to the local as the primary unit of concern: stronger civic infrastructure, deeper and more equitable access to resources, and forms of development that sustain communities rather than passing through them. Writers and literature cannot substitute for this work, but they are not separate from it either.
Artists, in general, play the crucial role of rendering a community legible to itself; of registering change before the data catches up; of holding local power accountable in languages and contexts that local audiences can recognize; of insisting on the complexity of places that policy tends to flatten. Literature, at its most serious, is a form of attention to the near. NYBALF 2026 takes this as its starting point.
 

The festival brings writers from across Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the wider diaspora to Harlem for four days of sustained encounter. Through facilitated dialogue and shared reflection, this year’s participants will examine what accountability to the near requires, what it makes possible and what it forecloses.
 

An open call for community co-programming on this year’s theme will go out in June keeping with our commitment to remain porous to ideas and communities outside our curatorial view. Guest and program announcements will follow.
 

We look forward to hosting you in Harlem in the fall.

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Efe Paul-Azino

Festival Director

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