New York Black and African Literature Festival Returns to Harlem This September
From September 18–20, 2026, the New York Black & African Literature Festival (NYBALF) returns to Harlem for its second edition. For a weekend of literature at close range, the Harlem Stage will bring together writers, poets, scholars, artists, and public thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and the wider Black diaspora.
This year’s festival is organized around The Village in the Book: Literature and the Near, asking what happens when the large forces of history become intimate: when questions of migration, political power, language, race, environmental destruction, memory, and belonging are encountered through the neighborhood, the family, the body, the reader, and the places nearest to us.
“New York is global because so many worlds are brought into proximity here, without losing their particular histories,” said Efe Paul-Azino, founder and director of NYBALF. “This year we are interested in what happens when the large forces of history, language, politics, migration, and social change become intimate in the places and relationships closest to us, and how literature can remain more accountable to the worlds from which it speaks.”
The second edition builds on NYBALF’s inaugural 2025 festival in Harlem while expanding the project’s central proposition: that Black literature is not one conversation but a field of conversations between languages, cities, political histories, generations, and forms.
NYBALF also announces a new presenting partnership with Harlem Stage, bringing the festival’s three-day weekend of literature, performance, and conversation to the historic Harlem Stage Gatehouse at 150 Convent Avenue.
The collaboration places two institutions invested in Black artistic life into a shared Harlem frame: one with more than four decades of presenting and commissioning artists of color and a young literary festival built to create sustained encounters between writers and readers across the Black world.
For more information, contact them at www.blackandafricanlitfestny.com