New York Black and African Literature Festival

New York Black and African Literature Festival A literary festival in the heart of New York connecting the global black diaspora.

“Come chop” is a familiar Nigerian invitation: come and eat, come sit, come share in what is on the table. Positioned as...
09/10/2026

“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.

Sunday, September 20 · 1:00 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

Between the late 1940s and the end of the 1960s, traders, printers, and schoolteachers in Onitsha turned a riverside mar...
09/10/2026

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 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.

Sunday, September 20 · 11:30 AM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

DAY TWO, LOCKED IN.Saturday at NYBALF 2026 moves from young readers and the future of attention to mystery, political hi...
09/09/2026

DAY TWO, LOCKED IN.

Saturday at NYBALF 2026 moves from young readers and the future of attention to mystery, political history, environmental memory, friendship and cinema.

We begin with It Takes a Village: Young Readers in the Age of the Feed, bringing Ibi Zoboi, Candice Iloh and Mahogany L. Browne together for a conversation about books, attention and the worlds young people are being asked to navigate.

Then The Scene of the Crime: A Harlem Mystery with Nekesa Afia turns the festival into a live literary mystery, inviting audiences into a story of clues, suspicion and deduction rooted in Harlem.

From there, The Burning Ground brings Noo Saro-Wiwa and Alexis Okeowo into conversation on the Niger Delta, extraction, memory and the long afterlife of oil.

At Slow Poison, Mahmood Mamdani joins Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún to think through Uganda, citizenship, colonialism, state power and political belonging.
Later, The People We Make Family brings Angela Flournoy, Myriam J. A. Chancy and Sony Ton-Aime together around friendship, migration, intimacy, chosen kinship and the families we inherit and create.

And we close the day with Tsotsi, returning to Athol Fugard’s story through the Academy Award-winning film and its enduring questions of violence, tenderness, survival and transformation.

A full day of literature, argument, play, memory and encounter.

Saturday, September 19
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

Swipe through the full Day Two programme, then reserve your place at blackandafricanlitfestny.com. Seat on a first come basis.



Ibi Zoboi, Candice Iloh and Mahogany L. Browne come together for a conversation about books, attention, digital culture and the communities that shape a reading life.

11:30 AM · Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

In The Scene of the Crime: A Harlem Mystery with Nekesa Afia, audiences are invited into an interactive literary investigation built around clues, suspicion and the pleasures of solving a story together.

Part reading, part mystery, part collective deduction.

12:30 PM · Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

Noo Saro-Wiwa and Alexis Okeowo turn toward the Niger Delta, where family history,

Master kora player Yacouba Sissoko devotes his musical gift to expand the awareness of West African history and culture,...
09/09/2026

Master kora player Yacouba Sissoko devotes his musical gift to expand the awareness of West African history and culture, spread the word of peace, and empower his listeners to take charge and realize their imagined futures.

On opening night of NYBALF 2026, she joins Patricia Smith, Yaissa Jiménez, Titilope Sonuga, Jasmine Mans, and Camoghne Felix for Let the Poets Govern at Harlem Stage.

An evening of poetry, music, and invocation, followed by the festival’s opening reception.

Friday, September 18 · 8:00 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

Link in bio for tickets.

Camonghne Felix, poet and essayist, is the author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World, 2023),...
09/09/2026

Camonghne Felix, poet and essayist, is the author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World, 2023), which was hailed by TIME Magazine and Vogue as one of the most anticipated books of 2023 and top memoirs of 2023.

On opening night of NYBALF 2026, she joins Patricia Smith, Yaissa Jiménez, Titilope Sonuga, Jasmine Mans, and Yacouba Sissoko for Let the Poets Govern at Harlem Stage.

An evening of poetry, music, and invocation, followed by the festival’s opening reception.

Friday, September 18 · 8:00 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

Link in bio for tickets.

In conversation with Sony Ton-Aime, Angela Flournoy and Myriam J. A. Chancy turn toward the relationships we inherit and...
09/09/2026

In conversation with Sony Ton-Aime, Angela Flournoy and Myriam J. A. Chancy turn toward the relationships we inherit and the ones we choose: friendship, kinship, migration, class, intimacy and the people who sustain us through the long middle of a life.

Bringing Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness into conversation with Chancy’s Village Weavers, the session asks what happens when friendship becomes one of the central structures through which we understand belonging.

What do we owe the people who knew us before we became ourselves? What happens when distance, ambition, migration or history alters those bonds? And where does family begin when the conventional definitions no longer quite hold?

Saturday, September 19 · 5:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

Free to attend. Limited seating.

Reserve your seat at blackandafricanlitfestny.com



Angela Flournoy writes with remarkable attention to yhe loyalties, disappointments, silences and forms of care that accumulate between people.

Her fiction asks what holds relationships together when the conditions around them change, and what people continue to owe one another across distance, adulthood and the different lives they build.

At The People We Make Family, Flournoy brings The Wilderness into conversation with Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers for an exploration of friendship and the families we make for ourselves.

Saturday, September 19 · 5:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

Across her fiction and scholarship, Myriam J. A. Chancy has written about migration, memory, displacement and the relationships through which people carry history.

Her novel Village Weavers follows a friendship across countries, generations and decades, asking how intimacy survives the forces that separate people and how the past continues to live inside the relationships we make.

At NYBALF 2026, she joins Angela Flournoy and Sony Ton-Aime to think about friend as kinship and the lives that emerge between the families we inherit and those we choose.

Saturday, September 19 · 5:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

Poet, writer and cultural worker Sony Ton-Aime joins Angela

For more than four decades, Mahmood Mamdani has asked some of the hardest questions about colonialism, political identit...
09/08/2026

For more than four decades, Mahmood Mamdani has asked some of the hardest questions about colonialism, political identity and the modern African state.

His work has examined how categories such as native, settler, citizen and stranger are made politically, and what happens when those distinctions become the architecture of public life.

At NYBALF 2026, Mamdani turns that inquiry toward Uganda and toward his own history within it.

Saturday, September 19 · 4:00 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

FREE to attend. Limited seats available. Register at www.blackandafricanlitfestny.com/register



Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún works across writing, linguistics, translation and cultural criticism, with a sustained interest in language, history and the ways African societies narrate themselves.

At Slow Poison, he joins Mahmood Mamdani for a conversation about Uganda, citizenship and the political making of belonging.

What happens when the categories inherited from colonial rule survive independence? And what can the history of one country tell us about the larger problem of building political communities after empire?

Saturday, September 19 · 4:00 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

Thirty years after the ex*****on of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, the questions at the center of the Niger Delta re...
09/08/2026

Thirty years after the ex*****on of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, the questions at the center of the Niger Delta remain painfully alive.

In The Burning Ground, Noo Saro-Wiwa returns to a landscape shaped by oil, environmental devastation, political struggle and the long consequences of extraction. In conversation with Alexis Okeowo, she considers what it means to inherit a place as both family history and national wound.

How does ecological destruction enter everyday life?What can writing recover that public memory has allowed to disappear?

Saturday, September 19 · 2:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

Free to attend. Limited seating.
Reserve your seat at blackandafricanlitfestny.com



Noo Saro-Wiwa has spent much of her writing life looking closely at place: at what landscapes remember, what nations conceal, and the ways history enters ordinary life.

In The Burning Ground, that attention turns toward the Niger Delta and toward a history that is also deeply personal. Thirty years after the ex*****on of her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the Ogoni Eight, she returns to the region to reckon with oil, environmental devastation, political struggle and what has endured.

At NYBALF 2026, she joins Alexis Okeowo for a conversation about inheritance, memory and the difficult work of writing a place to which one is bound by both love and loss.

Saturday, September 19 · 2:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse



As a journalist and writer, Alexis Okeowo has reported on conflict, religion, gender, power and social change across the African continent, with an eye for what becomes visible when politics is approached through individual lives.

At The Burning Ground, Okeowo joins Noo Saro-Wiwa to think through the Niger Delta, environmental destruction, political inheritance and the unresolved consequences of one of modern Nigeria’s defining struggles.

Saturday, September 19 · 2:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse

Thirty years after the ex*****on of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, the questions at the center of the Niger Delta re...
09/08/2026

Thirty years after the ex*****on of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight, the questions at the center of the Niger Delta remain painfully alive.

In The Burning Ground, Noo Saro-Wiwa returns to a landscape shaped by oil, environmental devastation, political struggle and the long consequences of extraction. In conversation with Alexis Okeowo, she considers what it means to inherit a place as both family history and national wound.

How does ecological destruction enter everyday life? What can writing recover that public memory has allowed to disappear?

A conversation about the Niger Delta, but also about inheritance, accountability and what happens when the history of a place becomes inseparable from the history of a family.

Saturday, September 19 · 2:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

Free to attend. Limited seating.

Reserve your seat at blackandafricanlitfestny.com



Noo Saro-Wiwa has spent much of her writing life looking closely at place: at what landscapes remember, what nations conceal, and the ways history enters ordinary life.

In The Burning Ground, that attention turns toward the Niger Delta and toward a history that is also deeply personal. Thirty years after the ex*****on of her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the Ogoni Eight, she returns to the region to reckon with oil, environmental devastation, political struggle and what has endured.

At NYBALF 2026, she joins Alexis Okeowo for a conversation about inheritance, memory and the difficult work of writing a place to which one is bound by both love and loss.

Saturday, September 19 · 2:30 PM
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse



As a journalist and writer, Alexis Okeowo has reported on conflict, religion, gender, power and social change across the African continent, with an eye for what becomes visible when politics is approached through individual lives.

At The Burning Ground, Okeowo joins Noo Saro-Wiwa to think through the Niger Delta, environmental destruction, political inheritance and the unresolved consequences of one of modern Nigeria’s defining struggles.

Saturday, September 19 · 2:30 PM
Harlem S

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