NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Candice Iloh
Writer • Poet
candice iloh is the award-winning author of young adult novels, Every Body Looking, Break This House, and Salt the Water. A 2020 National Book Award Finalist and 2021 Printz Honoree, candice is a first-generation Nigerian-American writer whose books center home. They are a 2023 PEW Center for Arts & Heritage fellow and 2024 Leeway Foundation Transformation Awardee. When not writing, they teach writing for young people and popular fiction to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Events featuring
this guest
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.