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.

Home can be the place a person come 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).

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. Moderated by Meghan O’Rourke, (Sun In Days).

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.

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.

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. 

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. Author JD Glass and illustrator Kris Dresen document 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. Moderated by Ralph McDaniels.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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 former NYC Council Member Carlos Menchaca, Collaborative Governance Academy.