NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Alexis Okeowo
Writer
Alexis Okeowo, a contributing writer, has written about conflict, human rights, and culture for The New Yorker since 2010, reporting from Africa, Mexico, and the American South. Her feature “Tainted Earth” won the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Phillip D. Reed Award in 2022. Okeowo is the author of the books “A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa,” which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama.” Her work has been anthologized in “The Best American Sports Writing” (2017) and “The Best American Travel Writing” (2017). In 2020, Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York. She is a contributing editor at Vogue
Events featuring
this guest
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.