NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Myriam J. A. Chancy
Writer

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (Tin House), a Time Best Book of April 2024 and winner of the 2025 Fiction OCM Bocas Award in Caribbean Literature. Her work has received multiple awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Guyana Prize in Literature, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Gold Prize, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a "Best Book of 2021," by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, the Globe & Mail, shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award & Aspen Words Literary Prize, longlisted for Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize & the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels, The Scorpion’s Claw and Spirit of Haiti. She is also the author of several academic books, including Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters & Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. Recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature and Lit Hub. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
Events featuring
this guest

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.
