REGISTRATION IS OPEN
Register for NYBALF
2026
September 18-20, 2026 · Harlem, New York
Your General Pass gives you access to the festival’s program of conversations, readings, performances, books and public events across the weekend. A small number of limited capacity or separate ticketing events will require additional reservation.
Pay what you can, including $0.
FESTIVAL ARCHIVE PHOTO
FIRST LOOK
Event Highlights
Let the Poets Govern
Camonghne Felix · Titilope Sonuga · Yaissa Jimenez · Patricia Smith ·
Jasmine Mans · Yacouba Sissoko · Canisia Lubrin
The festival opens through poetry, music, voice and public imagination. Taking its title from Camonghne Felix’s Let the Poets Govern, this pan-diasporic offering moves us through invocation, poetry, performance, and music, setting the tone for the festival weekend.
Toni Morrison and the Black World: Namwali Serpell on Africa, Diaspora, and Philosophy
Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell considers Morrison’s relationship to the Black world and uses her fiction and essays as a way into the festival’s central theme: what does the village make possible, and what does it demand?
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.
Black Writing in Portuguese
Conceição Evaristo · João Melo ·
Dr. Calila das Mercê
Conceição Evaristo and João Melo consider how Black life is carried into fiction through memory, place, voice and form, bringing Brazilian and Angolan literary traditions into a conversation about the worlds language can hold.
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
A conversation about 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.
2026 Festival Theme
The Village
in the Book
Literature and the Near
What does literature owe to the places, languages and communities nearest to it??
What happens when the large forces of history, language, politics, migration, and social change become intimate in the places and relationships closest to us?
