NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Calila das Mercês
Poet • Writer
Calila das Mercês is a writer, journalist and researcher. PhD in Literature from the University of Brasilia, Master in Literary Studies from the State University of Feira de Santana, Graduated in Social Communication/Journalism from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia with studies at the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança in Portugal. She is interested in movements, representations, (self) presentations of socially invisible groups in literature and the arts. Her thesis, defended in 2021, marks the "Movements and (re)mappings of black women in contemporary Brazilian literature". It co-coordinates the Afro-Literary Festival of Cavalcante-Goiás, Chapada dos Veadeiros, where the Kalunga quilombo is located, the largest quilombola remnant in Brazil, according to the UN. He published "Notes from a surrounding interior and other affections" (2019, Padê Editorial), participated in publications in Jornal Drafta, Revista Granta (Portugal), and others. IG: @dasmerce
Events featuring
this guest
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.