NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
NYBALF 2026
EVENTS
FRIDAY SEPT 18
Friday Sept. 18 2026 • 2:00 PM | Institute of African Studies, Columbia University
The Stranger at Home: Afrophobia and the Limits of Black Solidarity
Sisonke Msimang · E. Tendayi Achiume · Sean Jacobs · Amaha Kassa · moderated by Abosede George
Across the twentieth century, Pan-Africanism imagined a commons linking Africa and its diasporas through shared histories of dispossession, resistance, and return. The present has strained that promise. With South Africa as a central point of departure, this conversation examines how African migrants are made into strangers within African and Black political life. Bringing together writers, scholars, and migrant-rights organizers, the session asks how citizenship, labor, class, borders, national injury, and state failure shape the limits of solidarity, and what solidarity requires if it must transcend slogans into law, shelter, public services, political voice, and everyday infrastructure.
Friday Sept. 18 2026 • 6:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Toni Morrison and the Black World: Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell
Toni Morrison gave Black literature one of its most enduring vocabularies of neighborhood, ancestor, memory, community, and return. In the festival’s opening keynote, Namwali Serpell considers Morrison’s relationship to the Black world and uses her fiction and essays as a way into the festival’s central theme: what does the village make possible, and what does it demand?
Friday Sept. 18 2026 • 8:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Let the Poets Govern: Opening Reception, Invocation, and Performance
Camonghne Felix · Titilope Sonuga · Yaissa Jimenez · Patricia Smith · Jasmine Mans · Yacouba Sissoko
The festival formally opens through poetry, music, voice, and public imagination. Taking its title from Camonghne Felix’s book, Let the Poets Govern sets the tone for the weekend through invocation and performance.
SATURDAY SEPT 19
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 11:00 AM | Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
From the Transcription Centre to the Schomburg Center: A Wikidata Edit-a-thon
Hosted by the Schomburg Center
Presented by the Schomburg Center as part of the 2026 New York Black and African Literature Festival, join us for this special Wikidata Edit-a-thon. Participants will create Wikidata items for the writers, works, organizations, and other entities referenced in the Schomburg Center’s Transcription Centre Interviews with African Writers audio collection. The event will include an introduction and training on Wikidata basics. We welcome all participants—no previous experience is necessary. We ask that attendees bring a laptop and set up a Wikidata account prior to the event via the account registration link.
Questions: schomburgmirs@nypl.org
Registration required. Must bring your own laptop.
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 1:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
The Scene of the Crime: A Harlem Mystery with Nekesa Afia
Nekesa Afia
In this interactive literary event, Nekesa Afia invites the audience into the craft of suspicion. Through reading, clues, audience prompts, and live discussion, The Scene of the Crime turns the room into a case file and asks what mystery fiction teaches us about place, character, motive, and attention. Part reading, part craft session, and part live whodunit.
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 4:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Mahmood Mamdani: Slow Poison
Mahmood Mamdani · in conversation with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Mahmood Mamdani has spent his career examining how colonial rule built political identities and divided populations into native, settler, citizen, and stranger. Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State brings those questions into the history of modern Uganda and into Mamdani’s own life. In conversation with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Mamdani considers what holds a nation together, what takes it apart, and how political communities are slowly reorganized into competing forms of belonging.
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 7:00 • PM | TSOTSI
Tsotsi
Tsotsi
Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Tsotsi takes us into the vibrant, volatile world of Johannesburg’s townships, where a young street gangster’s life is transformed by an unexpected act of compassion. Set against the pulse of contemporary South Africa, the film is a powerful story of violence, redemption, and the possibility of becoming someone new.
Raw, intimate, and deeply human, Tsotsi asks what happens when even the hardest heart is given a reason to change.
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 11:30 AM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
It Takes a Village: Young Readers in the Age of the Feed
Candice Iloh · Ibi Zoboi · moderated by Mahogany L. Browne
This conversation gathers writers for young people to consider what children’s and young adult literature can hold that an algorithm cannot: attention, patience, moral complexity, the long shape of a story, and a sense of where one comes from. The session asks what is at stake for young readers amid generated content, fractured attention, and rapidly changing technologies, and why a book made for a young person remains among the most serious things a writer can make.
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 2:30 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
The Burning Ground: Noo Saro-Wiwa on the Niger Delta
Noo Saro-Wiwa · moderated by Alexis Okeowo
Thirty years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, Noo Saro-Wiwa returns to the Niger Delta to examine what oil has done to land, water, politics, memory, and everyday life. Her new book, The Burning Ground, traces environmental devastation and the insurgencies, compromises, and survival strategies that followed. In conversation with Alexis Okeowo, Saro-Wiwa considers what it means to inherit a place as both family history and national wound, how ecological destruction becomes intimate, and how writing can hold political accountability, memory, inheritance, and the afterlives of political struggle in the same frame.
Saturday Sept. 19 2026 • 5:30 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
The People We Make Family: Angela Flournoy and Myriam J. A. Chancy on Friendship, Kinship, and the Lives Between
Angela Flournoy · Myriam J. A. Chancy · in conversation with Sony Ton-Aime
This session brings Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness into conversation with Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers to explore the families we inherit and the ones we build: friendship, migration, class, intimacy, and the relationships that sustain us when conventional ideas of kinship no longer quite hold.
SUNDAY SEPT 20
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 11:30 AM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
The Market and Popular Literature
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún · Kurt Thometz · Uju Anya
Between the late 1940s and the end of the 1960s, traders, printers, and schoolteachers in Onitsha turned a riverside market into one of the most prolific publishing scenes in modern Africa. Their pamphlets offered lessons in love, city life, etiquette, ambition, morality, and survival in an English that was inventive, unruly, and entirely its own. This conversation returns to Onitsha Market Literature and the wider traditions of popular writing it belongs to, asking where Nigerian literature begins, who literature is made for, what ordinary readers have always wanted from books, and what today’s publishing debates might learn from writing that flourished without metropolitan permission.
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 2:30 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Black Writing in Portuguese
Conceição Evaristo · João Melo · Dr. Calila das Mercês
The Portuguese-speaking Black world rarely enters the Anglophone Pan-African conversation, though it stretches across Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Portugal, and their diasporas. This bilingual conversation considers what happens when Black writers take a language inherited through colonial rule and make it answerable to lives, histories, rhythms, and communities it was never designed to hold.
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 6:00PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Keynote: A Literary Life — Conceição Evaristo
Conceição Evaristo · in conversation with Dr. Calila das Mercês
The festival closes with Conceição Evaristo, one of the defining voices of contemporary Black Brazilian literature. Through a bilingual reading and conversation, Evaristo reflects on a literary life shaped by memory, ancestry, women’s lives, community, and escrevivência: writing that emerges from lived Black experience and remains answerable to the worlds that produced it. As the closing keynote, the session gathers the festival’s central questions into one life and body of work: how literature carries the near, how private memory becomes collective history, and how a writer transforms the language of inheritance into a language capable of holding Black life.
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 1:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Come Chop: Food, Memory, and the Art of Gathering
Ozoz Sokoh · Ashanté Reese
“Come chop” is a familiar Nigerian invitation: come and eat, come sit, come share in what is on the table. Positioned as the festival’s Sunday lunch gathering, this layered literary and sensory session brings Nigerian food explorer and writer Ozoz Sokoh together with scholar and writer Ashanté Reese for a conversation on Black food, memory, geography, nourishment, care, and the politics of gathering. The session is being developed to move between reading, conversation, image, and taste, with short films and a focused Eat the Books element under consideration.
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 4:00 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Literature into Cinema: Arie and Chuko Esiri on Adapting Mrs Dalloway
Arie Esiri · Chuko Esiri · moderated by Lovia Gyarkye
A 90-minute conversation-led craft talk using Clarissa, Arie and Chuko Esiri’s reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in contemporary Lagos, as a case study in literary adaptation. The brothers will discuss how interiority becomes image and sound, how character and structure change across forms, what can be carried from a novel into cinema, what must be invented anew, and what happens when a story is translated across time, geography, culture, and medium. The session moves through screenwriting, directing, collaboration, performance, and visual language before opening into an extended audience Q&A.
Presented by
