NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Mahogany L. Browne
Writer • Poet
Mahogany L. Browne, a Kennedy Center’s Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Hawthornden, Poets House, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, Wesleyan University, & UCross. Browne’s books include A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe, Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for a play by Steppenwolf Theater), Black Girl Magic, and banned books Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne currently tours Chrome Valley (highlighted in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times) and is the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize winner. She holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree awarded by Marymount Manhattan College in 2024, is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center and writes across the genre as a resident of Brooklyn, NY.
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.