NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Harlem Stage presents NYBALF 2026
The New York Black and African Literature Festival returns for its second edition in collaboration with Harlem Stage, featuring conversations, readings, and performances at the historic Gatehouse.
Registration is open 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
Event Highlights
Friday, September 18 · 8 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
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.
Friday, September 18 · 6 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
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?
Sat. September 19 · 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.
Sat. September 19 · 2:30 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
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 Luscophone literary traditions into a conversation about the worlds language can hold.
Sat. September 19 · 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
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.
Sat. September 19 · 4 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Mahmood Mamdani:
Slow Poison
Mahmood Mamdani · in conversation with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Mamdani and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún explore Uganda’s political history, examining colonialism, citizenship, state power, memory, belonging, and the forces that unite or divide political communities.
Sun. September 20 · 1 PM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
Come Chop: Food, Memory, and the Art of Gathering
Ozoz Sokoh · Ashanté Reese
A sensory literary gathering exploring Black food, memory, geography, nourishment, and care. Ozoz Sokoh and Ashanté Reese consider the kitchen as archive and the table as a site of belonging, memory, and community.
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?
FESTIVAL ARCHIVE PHOTO
A book can describe a place. The harder question is whether the place can answer back.
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2026 Festival Partners
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