Harlem Stage X NYBALF 2026

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?

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. 

In this interactive literary event, Nekesa Afia invites the audience into the craft of suspicion. Through reading, clues, audience prompts, and live discussion, The Scene of the Crime turns the room into a case file and asks what mystery fiction teaches us about place, character, motive, and attention. Part reading, part craft session, and part live whodunit.

Thirty years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, Noo Saro-Wiwa returns to the Niger Delta to examine what oil has done to land, water, politics, memory, and everyday life. Her new book, The Burning Ground, traces environmental devastation and the insurgencies, compromises, and survival strategies that followed. In conversation with Alexis Okeowo, Saro-Wiwa considers what it means to inherit a place as both family history and national wound, how ecological destruction becomes intimate, and how writing can hold political accountability, memory, inheritance, and the afterlives of political struggle in the same frame.

Mahmood Mamdani has spent his career examining how colonial rule built political identities and divided populations into native, settler, citizen, and stranger. Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State brings those questions into the history of modern Uganda and into Mamdani’s own life. In conversation with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Mamdani considers what holds a nation together, what takes it apart, and how political communities are slowly reorganized into competing forms of belonging.

Angela Flournoy and Myriam J. A. Chancy in conversation with Sony Ton-Aime.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and adapted from the novel by Athol Fugard, Tsotsi takes us into the vibrant, volatile world of Johannesburg's townships, where a young gang leader's life is transformed by an unexpected act of compassion. Set against the pulse of contemporary South Africa, the film is a powerful story of violence, redemption, and the possibility of becoming someone new.

Raw, intimate, and deeply human, Tsotsi asks what happens when even the hardest heart is given a reason to change. 

Between the late 1940s and the end of the 1960s, traders, printers, and schoolteachers in Onitsha turned a riverside market into one of the most prolific publishing scenes in modern Africa. Their pamphlets offered lessons in love, city life, etiquette, ambition, morality, and survival in an English that was inventive, unruly, and entirely its own. This conversation returns to Onitsha Market Literature and the wider traditions of popular writing it belongs to, asking where Nigerian literature begins, who literature is made for, what ordinary readers have always wanted from books, and what today’s publishing debates might learn from writing that flourished without metropolitan permission.

“Come chop” is a familiar Nigerian invitation: come and eat, come sit, come share in what is on the table. Positioned as the festival’s Sunday lunch gathering, this layered literary and sensory session brings Nigerian food explorer and writer Ozoz Sokoh together with scholar and writer Ashanté Reese for a conversation on Black food, memory, geography, nourishment, care, and the politics of gathering. The session is being developed to move between reading, conversation, image, and taste, with short films and a focused Eat the Books element under consideration.

The Portuguese-speaking Black world rarely enters the Anglophone Pan-African conversation, though it stretches across Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Portugal, and their diasporas. This bilingual conversation considers what happens when Black writers take a language inherited through colonial rule and make it answerable to lives, histories, rhythms, and communities it was never designed to hold.

A 90-minute conversation-led craft talk using Clarissa, Arie and Chuko Esiri’s reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in contemporary Lagos, as a case study in literary adaptation. The brothers will discuss how interiority becomes image and sound, how character and structure change across forms, what can be carried from a novel into cinema, what must be invented anew, and what happens when a story is translated across time, geography, culture, and medium. The session moves through screenwriting, directing, collaboration, performance, and visual language before opening into an extended audience Q&A.

The festival closes with Conceição Evaristo, one of the defining voices of contemporary Black Brazilian literature. Through a bilingual reading and conversation, Evaristo reflects on a literary life shaped by memory, ancestry, women’s lives, community, and escrevivência: writing that emerges from lived Black experience and remains answerable to the worlds that produced it. As the closing keynote, the session gathers the festival’s central questions into one life and body of work: how literature carries the near, how private memory becomes collective history, and how a writer transforms the language of inheritance into a language capable of holding Black life.