Brooklyn Book Festival Announces 2026 Programming

Brooklyn Book Festival 2026 Schedule of Events 
for Festival Day, Virtual Festival Day, Bookend Events and BKBF Children’s Day
 

Festival Day & Literary Marketplace - Sunday, September 27 
Location: Brooklyn Borough Hall - 209 Joralemon Street
Time: 10am-6pm
brooklynbookfestival.org

BROOKLYN BOROUGH HALL COURTROOM
209 Joralemon Street (entrance to building from grand stairs or east side of building)

10am Give Us Our Daily Dread: Horror Comics
It’s not a comeback anymore—the horror genre keeps growing in contemporary comics. Moving from Batman to original horror hits such as Something is Killing The Children, James Tynion IV has made Exquisite Corpses, a serial killer battle royale, into the crown jewel of his genre fiction production house Tiny Onion. That Texas Blood co-creator Chris Condon continues to explore the dark corners of the American West with News from the Fallout. And Ezra Claytan Daniels follows up his award-winning graphic novels Upgrade Soul and BTTM FDRS with Mama Came Callin’, a tale set in the Florida bayou where a young biracial woman uncovers her estranged father’s role in a grisly hate crime. Get frightened and fascinated by these authors’ take on modern horror. Moderated by Tabrizia Jones, Graphics Committee member and New York City librarian.

11am Politics and the Responsibility of Writing, presented by New York Review Books
Amid the polarized politics and censored speech of our current moment, everyone with a platform is being urged to speak up. But do all writers have a responsibility to be political? What does political writing look like in today's climate—and how effective is it? Three award-winning authors, academics, and regular contributors to The New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell (On Morrison), Francine Prose, and Merve Emre, discuss the art, merits, and responsibility of political writing.

12pm Myths, Monsters, and the Stories We Tell
Every community creates stories about its saints and sinners, heroes and monsters—but what do those stories conceal as much as they reveal? In John Manuel Arias's Crocodilopolis, a powerful political family's mythology of greatness gives way to a story of corruption, revenge, and betrayal. In Téa Obreht's Sunrise, three lives separated by more than a century converge around a legendary town whose history has become inseparable from its myths, reenactments, and stories of heroes and villains. And in Deesha Philyaw's The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, a woman who has constructed an enviable public identity within the church discovers just how quickly that carefully maintained image can falter. These writers explore stories that make sense of power, and what happens when the truth underneath it all can’t be contained. Moderated by Jordan Hernandez, founder and curator of Completely Booked.

1pm 2026 BoBi Honoree Amitav Ghosh in Conversation with Nathaniel Rich
2026 BoBi honoree and NYT bestselling novelist Amitav Ghosh will be joined in conversation by Nathaniel Rich, author of Cloudthief and three previous novels. Ghosh is the author of 11 novels including Sea of Poppies (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and most recently Ghost-Eye. His works of nonfiction include The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg's Curse. 

2pm Mountains, Jungles and Deserts
A tense political climate and fractured society can have many victims, but a critical one is often forgotten: the environment. How do novelists capture the hyper development of natural environments and wildlife? These books place the beauty of the natural world in juxtaposition with its devastation. Exploring three very different cultures and ecosystems—the mountains of Tibet, the Malayan jungle, and the Mojave Desert—Chen Fu-Hsu (What’s a Snow Leopard to You?, trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin), Sharmini Aphrodite (The Unrepentant: Short Stories), and Claire Vaye Watkins (Yellow Pine) speak on the exploitation of nature for political and economic ends. Moderated by Ashley Dawson (Environmentalism from Below). 

3pm What We Inherit, What We Retell
How and why do the stories we inherit become part of the narratives we tell about ourselves? Drawing on myth, song, literature, and cultural memory, internationally acclaimed authors Sinan Antoon, Violaine Huisman, and Valeria Luiselli discuss intertextuality as a way of thinking through memory, exile, family, history, and identity in their respective novels, Of Loss and Lavender, The Monuments of Paris, and Beginning Middle End. How do myths and literature help us understand rupture and belonging? What happens when private memory meets collective history? And can cultural canons offer a way not only of remembering the past, but also of imagining a life beyond it? Moderated by Sanaë Lemoine (The Margot Affair).

4pm What the Past Refuses to Bury
Some histories don’t fall behind, they cling. In Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye, a young girl's memories of another life reverberate across generations, drawing a psychologist, her family, and eventually a new generation into a mystery connecting past and present. In Melissa Faliveno's Hemlock, a woman returns to the Wisconsin woods where her mother vanished and finds herself confronting an inheritance that may be psychological, supernatural, or something more difficult to name. In Robyn Gigl’s All We Hide, a trans detective exiled to the cold case unit begins digging into the murder of a local trans woman and high school classmate, a case seemingly connected to the disappearance of her mother. Across very different forms of storytelling, these writers ask what happens when the past refuses to remain past—and whether it's possible to escape what we inherit. Moderated by book critic Hamilton Cain (This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing)

5pm Solitary Paths
Three acclaimed novelists explore solitude, freedom, and self-invention. Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny follows two young people across India, Vermont, and New York City as they navigate family ties, social class, and the pursuit of happiness. Yu-Mei Balasingamchow's Names Have Been Changed traces a fugitive's journey from Singapore to a life on the run after a petty crime spirals out of control, exploring identity, reinvention, and the shifting meaning of home. Leïla Slimani's I’ll Take the Fire (trans. Sam Taylor), chronicles a young woman's coming-of-age in socially conservative Morocco as she pursues personal, sexual, and political freedom while defining her own place in the world. Moderated by Margie Cook.


CENTER STAGE
Columbus Park

10am When We Gather: On Food, Celebration, and Ritual
In times like these especially, the power of gathering over shared nourishment and experience ripens with political possibility in anthropologist Ashanté Reese's Gather, joyful festivity in entertaining expert Amber Mayfield Hewett's Your Turn to Host, and fulsome flavor in chef Natasha Pickowicz's Everyone Hot Pot. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation moderated by Danielle Davenport, co-founder of BEM, a bookstore and foundation celebrating Black food books.
 
11am Phases of the Self
Artists spend their lives creating from the contradictions of being alive. In Brandon Taylor's Minor Black Figures, a painter researching the career of a forgotten Black artist finds himself confronting questions about creativity, belief, friendship, and what it means to make Black art. In Davey Davis's Casanova 20: Or, Hot World, two friends grapple with aging, mortality, and personal loss spurred by the pandemic. And in Sigrid Nunez's It Will Come Back to You, decades of short stories trace an evolving literary sensibility while probing death, grief, art, love, and the deeper questions tucked within ordinary life. Together, these three writers consider the complicated relationship between lived experience and artistic creation—and the ways making art can become a way of making a self.

12pm Reimagining America
What does it mean to imagine America otherwise? Poets Tina Chang (LION), Erika Meitner (Assembled Audience), and Jonah Mixon-Webster (Promise/Threat) read and discuss how poetry can remake ideas and realities about nation, identity, and belonging, finding new ways of imagining our lives. Moderated by Edgar Kunz (Fixer).

1pm The Price of a Good Life
The promise of prosperity can be seductive—but what happens when the life we have worked to achieve begins to reveal its costs? In Courtney Maum's Alan Opts Out, a successful advertising executive rejects the capitalist system he has spent his career serving, forcing his family to reconsider its own ambitions and definition of success. In Cleyvis Natera's The Grand Paloma Resort, a luxury vacation paradise exposes the vast divide between the wealthy visitors enjoying its pleasures and the workers whose lives are shaped by their demands. And in Kayla Rae Whitaker's Returns and Exchanges, a Kentucky family's American Dream begins to fracture as money, status, ambition, and changing ideas about the future pull its members apart. Together, these novels sit with what we sacrifice in pursuit of success, and whether or not achieving it means getting what we actually want. Moderated by Tracy O’Neill.

2pm Too Close For Comfort
Place, from the city and neighborhood to the personal space we call home, informs our identity and this proximity affects the way we perceive ourselves and others. Giada Scodellaro's Ruins, Child follows a group of six Black women tending to each other in a derelict apartment building in a deteriorating urban environment while their daily lives are being broadcast, allowing their neighbors—and each other—to monitor and judge them. In Karan Mahajan's The Complex, the descendants of one of India's political architects live in the same dilapidated apartment building as they compete for influence and power as well as for more space and better rooms. Bindu Bansinath's Men Like Ours follows a South Asian community in New Jersey, where the death of a family friend brings the women of Willow Road together in a police investigation, delivering intel in the form of neighborhood gossip and snippy comments. Moderated by Zain Khalid (Brother Alive).
 
3pm The Cost of Fame
They say the higher you climb, the harder you fall, and the pursuit of fame across all disciplines comes with unexpected consequences. In Emma Straub's American Fantasy, a beloved 90s boy band reunion on a cruise ship tests the limits of fandom with its now older fan base. In Teddy Wayne's The Au Pair, a floundering literary star is caught up in a scandal with his Norwegian au pair who adores his books. In Dimitry Elias Léger's Death of the Soccer God, a global soccer star's rise to the World Cup puts him in the line of tragedy and heartbreak. All three novels explore the cost of fame and how these characters deal with a fall from grace. 

4pm The Women Who Shape Us
Mothers and their proxies tend to take on the bulk of directing a child's life, which can lead to fraught relationships, atypical life lessons, and disappointment in the unexpected direction their child pursues. In Jordy Rosenberg's Night Night Fawn, Barbara Rosenberg reflects on her life and failed guidance of her gender-nonconforming child, who is taking care of her in an opioid-filled high on her deathbed. In Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's Heavy Cream, Gerry's upbringing is filled with lessons not found in textbooks and dictated by the whims of a mentally unwell mother who suddenly abandons her in the care of three women navigating life in a very different way. In Avigayl Sharp's Offseason, the unnamed narrator finds herself back at her parents' house during a school break, reflecting on her unstable relationship with her mother and whether her memory of her is reliable. Moderated by Fanta Diallo.

5pm Future Ancestors
Poets Fatimah Asghar (Daughter of the Mountains), Diamond Forde (The Book of Alice), Naomi Shihab Nye (Sidekick), and Meghan O’Rourke (Sun In Days) read and consider the futures we can imagine and carry forward or transform for those who come after us. Moderated by Hafizah Augustus Geter.


NORTH STAGE
Cadman Plaza East and Johnson Street in the Korean War Veteran's Park
(Rain Venue: Brooklyn Heights Library - 280 Cadman Plaza West)

11am Branching Out: On the Future of Environmental Storytelling, presented by Orion Magazine 
The genre of environmental writing has been expanding in recent years. Writers for Orion Magazine have pushed the boundaries of the genre by exploring the surprising intersections between nature writing and other forms, themes, and subjects. Nonfiction writers and Orion contributors Meera Subramanian (A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis), Maria Pinto (Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival), and Nicholas Triolo (The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere) join Orion publisher Neal Thompson to discuss these necessary evolutions in environmental writing and how they transform our view of the world. 

12pm Who? New!
Each season, BKBF presents several debut authors whom we want to shine the light on for our audience. This year we present bookstore co-founder Jules Wernersbach (Work To Do),  writer and editor Radhika Singh (Earthly Playing Field), professor Che Yeun (Tailbone) and multi-media artist Ankur Thakkar (Blow Yourself Up). A special guest will introduce the authors and talk about their own experience when they were a debut author.

1pm The Poet Translator
Poets and translators Haleh Liza Gafori (Rumi's Gold and Water), John Murillo (Rafael Alberti's Concerning the Angels), and Yasmine Seale (The Annotated Arabian Nights) read and discuss the generative relationship between poetry and translation and what happens to a poet's sense of language, form, and possibility when working between languages. Moderated by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado.

2pm The Culinary Life: Crafting Narrative and Memoir Through Food
Food is life, and for culinary lives—where craft, relationships, and personal growth are rooted in the kitchen—the lens of food can sometimes be the clearest vantage point from which to look back. Join us to explore the ways food guides narrative in memoirs by chefs and writers Brigid Washington, author of Salt, Sweat & Steam and Zahra Tangorra, author of Extra Sauce; and in Tanya Bush's narrative cookbook Will This Make You Happy; moderated by Lisa Donovan, author of Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. 

3pm Breaking Through: Navigating the Journey from “Emerging Writer” to Debut Novelist presented by the Center for Fiction
Each year, the Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship provides creative and professional support to nine NYC writers who have not yet published a book of fiction. Don’t miss this panel with alumni Hafeez Lakhani, author of Abundance; Sarah Wang, author of New Skin; and Katie Yee, author of Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, about what it takes to break into the world of publishing. Taking readers from donut shops to hospital rooms and reality TV sets, their novels weave together humor and tragedy in equal measure, offering a compelling sample of what today's most promising debut authors have to offer. Moderated by 2021-2022 Fellowship alumna, Gina Chung (Sea Change).


BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL MOOT COURTROOM
250 Joralemon Street 

10am Reclaiming the Human Connection: Movement, Media, and Micro-Rituals
How do we break the modern cycle of digital exhaustion? Join Webby Award-winning host Manoush Zomorodi (Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the New Digital Age and the New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being), acclaimed media theorist Ian Bogost (The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life) and master cultural chronicler Bruce Feiler (A Time To Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us) as they map the intersection of physical burnout, media saturation, and social isolation. Moving past shallow tech critiques, the three authors offer a tactical masterclass on how to reclaim our agency, unchain from our screens, repair our bodies, and rebuild authentic human connection from the ground up. Moderated by New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose. 

11am Bold Paths to Reform, presented by Brooklyn Law School
When the status quo isn’t working, ambitious political and economic reforms are needed. Mechele Dickerson's The Middle-Class New Deal looks back to the creation of the American middle class as a solution to the economic distress of the Great Depression, laying out a plan to rebuild our modern middle class and expand economic opportunity for the everyday American. Hélène Landemore's Politics Without Politicians reimagines the American government as a true democracy—one ruled by the people, for the people—by doing away with politicians and instead electing real civilians to do the governing. Two authors at the forefront of political economic research explore the current need for transformative change, share their vision of the future, and discuss the challenges of convincing readers to embrace ambitious ideas. Moderated by Sarah C. Haan, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School.

12pm Secrets, Lies, and Memory
Every family has a vault, but what happens when we start digging through the contents? Join New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv (You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters), journalist Tom Junod (In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means To Be a Man: A Memoir), and novelist Ed Park (Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties) for a mesmerizing conversation on the construction of secrets. Together, the three master chroniclers will explore the thin line between memory and myth, pulling back the curtain on the scripts families use to shield darker realities—and the many ways we endeavor to protect ourselves from our own pasts. Moderated by Naomi Extra, writer, cartoonist, and scholar at Rutgers University.

1pm The Anti-Equality Era
Join Ben Tarnoff (Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, co-authored with Quinn Slobodian), historian Kim Phillips-Fein (Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America) and Amazon Labor Union cofounder Derrick Palmer (Handbook for the Revolution: Building a More Perfect Union for the Twenty-First Century) for a discussion of the people and systems of American inequality, and what we might be able to do about them. Moderated by Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Know Your Enemy podcast.

2pm Nature from the Margins
From the fossil record to the edges of space, science passes through a sense of wonder about humanity and our place in the universe. Three exemplary science writers on what the study of the natural world has to say about the human one: Beronda L. Montgomery (When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy), Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie) and Nathan H. Lents (The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships) in discussion. Moderated by Joseph Osmundson (Spawning Season).

3pm 250 Years in Search of a More Perfect Union, presented by The Nation
A conversation about what it will take to preserve our freedom, our democracy, and our future for the next 250 years—and what the last 250 have taught us about the work still unfinished. As the nation marks a quarter-millennium since its founding, this panel brings together historians, poets, journalists and policy experts to explore what “a more perfect union” has meant, who has been included in that promise, and what it demands of us now. Featuring historian William Hogeland, poet Martín Espada, editor and author Regina Mahone, and writer and podcaster Dave Zirin. Moderated by John Nichols, Executive Editor of The Nation. 

4pm Dissidents and Movements: Being Part of the Solution
Authoritarianism thrives on fear, silence, and conformity. Breaking that gridlock requires both individual courage and collective strategy. Join Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer (On Courage: How To Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear), Jelani Cobb (Three of More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here), and Anand Gopal (Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution) for this essential panel on modern resistance, nationally and internationally. From committed whistleblowers standing up to corporate and state power, to civil rights organizers on the front lines, to the brave Syrian citizens fighting to overthrow a dictatorship, this reportage and conversation goes behind the scenes of history and tracks resistance today to show how people can organize to confront modern tyranny—and make a difference. Moderated by Carlos Menchaca, Collaborative Governance Academy.

5pm How to Build A Fascist-Free Future: Lessons from the Past, Encouragement for the Present
Ibram X. Kendi (Chain of Ideas), movement leader Yotam Marom (For Louder Days), and journalist Osita Nwanevu (The Right of The People), in a wide-ranging discussion of our perilous national moment, what we can do to secure a brighter future, and how each of us plays a part in doing so. Moderated by Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights, and author of the forthcoming book Protest is Not a Crime.


BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL STUDENT LOUNGE
250 Joralemon Street (ground floor)

10am Nostalgia With A Twist
Your favorites like Little Women, Sleeping Beauty, Frankenstein, and The Ramanya are retold in breathtaking, fantastical, and sometimes deadly (!) ways in bestselling and award-winning novels. Join Katie Bernet (Beth Is Dead), Cindy Pham (The Secret World of Briar Rose), K. Ancrum (Adam, Mine), and moderator Newbery honoree Rajani LaRocca (Such Great Heights) in this twisty and fun panel about modern retellings. 

11am Booked & Banned
These are the books that readers refuse to put down. Join renowned authors Darcie Little Badger (Children of Owl), Camryn Garrett (In Between Days), and NYT-bestselling author Libba Bray (Under the Same Stars) in a candid conversation on banned books, free expression, and the stories that young adults deserve to read. Moderated by acclaimed author-illustrator Mike Curato (Flamer). 

12pm Fall Into Fantasy 
Be transported to incredible, unique fantasy worlds with bestselling authors! Join Sarah Beth Durst (The Faraway Inn), Amélie Wen Zhao (The Dragon and the Sun Lotus), and Shannon J. Spann (A Stage Set for Villains) for a compelling conversation about magic, romance, power, and family. Moderated by M.J. Hastings (Firstborn).

1pm Come to My Cottage
Did you fall in love on the ice this year? Keep the romance alive with other swoon-worthy love stories perfect for fans of both sports or queer romance! Ashley Woodfolk (Queerleaders), Angelica Cheng (Fast Track), and Stef Ferrari (Pining for You) come together about what gets characters’ (and readers’) hearts beating faster. Moderated by NYT-bestselling author Page Powars (But I Hate Him).

2pm Can You Keep A Secret?
Get your heart racing during this session featuring bestselling author Danielle Valentine (Deadly Little Lesson), critically-acclaimed author E.L. Shen (Foreigners) and award-winning author Michael Ruhlman (A Taste of Somewhere Else) as they discuss a twisty mystery set at a boarding school that has a deadly curriculum, a thrilling historical romance that crosses generations, and a father and son looking for answers during a road trip across Spain. Moderated by award-winning author Natasha Díaz (What Lies Beneath the Flowers).

3pm New Works: A Poetry Reading
Poets Will Brewer (Nocturama), Peggy Robles-Alvarado (Burn Me Back), Maya C. Popa (If You Love That Lady), and R. A. Villanueva (A Holy Dread) read from their new volumes of poetry. Introduced by Parker Menzimer, Public Programs Director, Poetry Society of America.  

4pm Unbridled
Some feelings resist containment. Left unbridled, they can drive a person to decisions that feel inevitable in the moment and unrecognizable in hindsight. In Quiara Alegría Hudes’ The White Hot, a single mother's all-consuming rage starts to appear in her young daughter and triggers only one response: to leave her child. In Morgan Thomas’ Mad Eden, a Southern trans healthcare worker recalls a summer of utmost joy that is followed by an unexpected unraveling of everything they’ve carefully built. In Nathaniel Rich's Cloudthief, a climate journalist's sense of malaise leads him to be drawn into a plot to rob a data center. Moderated by Olivia Rutigliano.


CENTER FOR BROOKLYN HISTORY 
128 Pierrepont Street

10am Brooklyn Public Library's Book Prize Winners’ Panel 
Hear the winners of this year's Brooklyn Public Library's Book Prize who will discuss their work and delve into the book's inception and creation. Each fall, Brooklyn Public Library honors outstanding works of nonfiction and fiction/poetry with the BPL Book Prize. Past winners include Mosab Abu Toha, Emet North, Catherine Lacey, Lamya H, John Paul Brammer, Xochitl Gonzalez, Craig Taylor, and Threa Almontaser, and many others. 

11am Secrets of the Stacks of New York City
If you think all city libraries are similar, think again. NYPL's Library for the Performing Arts houses one of the world's most extensive research collections in theater, film, dance, music, and recorded sound; and Brooklyn Public Library serves as a vital cultural resource for the borough's 2.7 million residents. Dive deep into the stacks of these libraries in a conversation with Amy Mikel, Senior Director at Brooklyn Public Library; and Doug Reside, Curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, NYPL for the Performing Arts. Moderated by David Giles, Chief Strategy Officer at Brooklyn Public Library. You can access the Festival's free guide on Bloomberg Connects [here]. Access the Festival's free guide on Bloomberg Connects [Click Here].

12pm Women Changing History
Across fiction, biography, and memoir, three new graphic novels show the motivations, agency, and bravery of intelligent women up against powerful men and totalitarian armies. Andrea Chalupa (Mrs. Orwell) dives into the life of Eileen Blair, poet and wife of George Orwell, who accompanied him to Spain when he chose to fight against Franco's fascist army. Susan Simensky Bietila (Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance) illustrates her full life as an activist, moving from the pioneering second-wave feminist newspaper RAT to the World War 3 Illustrated comics collective while building and deploying protest art for decades of social justice movements. And Krystal Quiles adapts Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, which studies the lives, loves and failures of the Mirabal sisters, based on real women who resisted the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Moderated by Meg Lemke, Publishers Weekly editor and editor in chief of MUTHA Magazine.

1pm Worlds in Transit
What does it mean to leave home behind to make another elsewhere? In Megha Majumdar's A Guardian and a Thief, a mother desperately searches for stolen immigration documents as a worsening crisis in Kolkata threatens her family's chance to reach America, while the thief who absconded with them struggles to protect his own family. In M Lin's The Memory Museum, characters move between China, America, and imagined futures, confronting the disorientation of migration and the contradictions of living between cultures, races, and classes. And in Rachel Khong's My Dear You, questions of Asian American identity and belonging emerge through stories that move playfully between earthly, supernatural, robotic, and immortal. These three writers explore the strange, sometimes painful space between where we come from and the places we want to call home. Moderated by Ken Chen.

2pm 250 Years of American Activism
The comic book can lampoon the powerful, illustrate ideas, and preserve the history of activists and popular struggle. R. Sikoryak's Declaration, Illustrated remixes pop icons to make an illuminated, accessible edition of the Declaration of Independence, inviting us to question the contradictions and unfinished business of our country's values. Angélique Roché, through deep community research into generations of Black activism, preserves the story of the fight for federal recognition of Juneteenth as a holiday in First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth. Jarrett Dapier's Wake Now in the Fire documents high school students in Chicago who resisted a district-wide ban on the award-winning graphic novel Persepolis. Join these three authors’ discussion of what a comic can do to defend democracy.

3pm Liberation Sounds
Music and the people who produce it are an engine of cultural change and transformation. Jibola Fagbamiye's Fela: Music Is the Weapon documents the larger-than-life music and activism of Fela Kuti. After being influenced by the Black Power movement, Kuti became one of the principal innovators of Afrobeat, as well as a dedicated political activist arrested over 200 times protesting his country's military juntas. JD Glass documents another heady, political music scene in Punk Like Me, which explores escaping repression and finding queer freedom in the anarchic punk world of CBGB and the Lower East Side in the 1980s. 

4pm Survive, Salvage and Protest: Comics and the Climate
Young people today know that climate change is altering the world before their eyes. What will the future world look like—and will we survive? In her YA science-fiction graphic novel Salvage, Renée Nault depicts a class-stratified future megacity traversed by carefree technocratic children even as the outskirts of the city scrape by on salvaging and reselling the products of prior industry from buried city layers beneath the water. In How To Survive The End Of The World, Katy Doughty charts the different crises that might come to a head within our lifetime, and what has tipped the scales during previous climatic and other disasters for the human race. But all hope is not lost: Danica Novgorodoff discusses her and journalist Meera Subramanian's exploration of youth climate activism and its impacts in their nonfiction comic A Better World Is Possible: Youth Confront the Climate Crisis. Moderated by Kait Walser of the NYC Climate Writers Collective & the Climate Imaginarium. 

5pm Re-enacting, Revisiting History
History can appear in different guises in novels—as historical setting, archival material, or storylines evoking past traumas. In Jeyamohan's White Elephant (trans. Priyamvada Ramkumar), a nineteenth-century rebellion is captured against the backdrop of colonial rule in India; while Cristina Rivera Garza's The Autobiography of Cotton (trans. Christina MacSweeney), weaves family history and historical records to create a multi-layered portrait of 1930s Mexico-U.S. borderlands. In Tarantula (trans. Daniel Hahn), Eduardo Halfon evokes a reimagined version of his own 1980s Guatemalan childhood—and the Jewish summer camp that, oddly, featured Nazi re-enactments. Will the cycle go unbroken? Moderated by Sabir Sultan, director of World Voices Festival.


ST. ANN AND THE HOLY TRINITY CHURCH
157 Montague Street (enter on Clinton Street)

1:30pm The Many Facets of Toni Morrison
Novelists and critics Tayari Jones (Kin), Namwali Serpell (On Morrison), and Dana A. Williams (Toni at Random) explore the life and legacy of the great Toni Morrison, across the wide expanse of her literary life and works. The writers engage too with how their own work is in dialogue with Morrison, how her legacy would change the trajectories of their own writings and approaches to American letters. Moderated by Saeed Jones.

2:30pm Motherhood and Violence
Three acclaimed novelists explore motherhood, family, and the lasting effects of violence across generations and communities. Andrea Bajani (The Anniversary, trans. Geoffrey Brock) examines the legacy of domestic abuse through a son's decision to sever ties with his family. Edwidge Danticat (Dèy) follows a Haitian American woman confronting grief, trauma, and the fragile bonds between parents and children after a random act of violence. ‘Pemi Aguda (One Leg on Earth) blends folklore and history to explore pregnancy, urban change, and the unseen forces shaping women's lives in Lagos. Together, these novels examine the bonds that endure, those that break, and what cannot be severed. 

3:30pm The Places We Carry
Home can be the place a person comes from, the place they long to escape, and the place that continues to shape them long after they have left. In Douglas Stuart's John of John, Cal returns to the remote Isle of Harris and to his father, whose expectations of his son clash with Cal's struggle between who he is and the life he wants. In Tayari Jones's Kin, two women raised together in a small Louisiana town find their lives pulled apart by family, loss, ambition, and the search for belonging. Stuart and Jones explore the ties that bind us to family—and the secrets, absences, and inherited expectations that can make those ties both suffocating and sustaining. Together, these novels ask what happens when we leave the places that shape us, and what it means to return to them changed. Moderated by writer and curator Greg Mania (Born to Be Public).

4:30pm Multifaceted Manifestos: A conversation with Marlon James and Colson Whitehead
The 1980s is a decade infamous for its chaos, ugliness, and cruelty, but also adored for the art produced by a restless culture. These authors masterfully explore a time where beauty and violence existed simultaneously, and often because of each other. In Colson Whitehead's Cool Machine, a New York City in transition glimmers with promise, even as a successful Black storeowner must dip into the underground world of heists after his family is denied a loan. In Marlon James's The Disappearers, a group of queer men in ‘80s Kingston face the aftermath of a deadly mob attack, struggling to find their place in a subculture as vibrant and sexy as it is in crisis. Whitehead and James build thrilling stories that are at heart love letters to two complicated cities and a gutting reminder of a not-so-distant past that the marginalized must continue to heal from. Moderated by Johnny Temple, Brooklyn Literary Council Co-Chair and Publisher, Akashic Books.

###