Here you will find video programs from the previous years. Search by genre or the author’s name to find the exact content you’re looking for.
Fiction / International
Genre-abundant writers, poets, and academics Bhanu Kapil (Incubation: A Space for Monsters) and Billy-Ray Belcourt (Coexistence: Stories) convene for an intimate and multifaceted conversation on the ways their work approaches survival – in the face of imperialism, settler-colonialism, misogyny, and more – and the ways they embrace hybridity and invert monstrosity in favor of fluidity, and ultimately, liberation. Moderated by poet and critic, Eunsong Kim.
Free
International / Non-Fiction
Writers Hisham Matar (My Friends), Rania Mamoun (Something Evergreen Called Life, trans Yasmine Seale), and Omar Khalifah (Sand-Catcher, trans Barbara Romaine) come together to discuss the duty of the writer during periods of global crisis, in a conversation moderated by writer and translator Yasmine Seale. What do writers owe their collective communities, as contemporary artists from Middle Eastern and North African countries? How do they navigate ambivalence, education, activism, and care in their creative and professional work, while avoiding cliche and the commodification of trauma?
Free
Fiction / Non-Fiction / Poetry
One novelist, one memoirist and one poet — all working with A.I. as muse, collaborator and inspiration from the early days of generative A.I. to ChatGPT and into an uncertain future. What are the possibilities of A.I. for writers, and what are the perils? Join essayist and author Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks and “Dear Chatbot, Should I Write About My Dead Mother?”) for a conversation with novelist Sean Michaels (Do You Remember Being Born?), poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (Negative Money) and memoirist Hannah Silva (My Child, The Algorithm: An Alternatively Intelligent Book of Love) about the surprises of A.I. in their work, defying the backlash against A.I. in creativity, and embracing, or at least accepting, this unlikely collaborator. Presented with NYU’s 370J Project.
1:00pm
Fiction / International
Writers of potent, electrifying, and candid novels – Vigdis Hjorth (If Only, trans. from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) and Eva Baltasar (Mammoth, trans from Catalan by Julia Sanches) – come together to discuss passion and disenchantment. If Only tells the story of a young woman who begins a tumultuous affair, a cascading fantasy that eventually shatters. In Baltasar’s Mammoth, a young lesbian moves to an abandoned farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, battles stray cats, and dabbles in sex work – all to seek out the pulp and quick of life. Hjorth and Baltasar ask pressing, urgent questions about how desire and ardent joy are wound up with creativity, creation, and philosophy. Moderated by Lily Philpott, writer and co-chair of the International Committee.
Free
Fiction / International
In Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, an opium-smoking Irishman and his mail-order bride are on the run in 1890s Montana. In Ye Chun’s Straw Dogs of the Universe, 10-year-old Sixiang journeys across an unfamiliar American landscape in the hopes of finding her long-lost father, who works on the railroads in California. In Like the Appearance of Horses, Andrew Krivak concludes the Dardan trilogy with a narrative about three generations who built a new life in America, and whose bonds were shaped by the great conflicts of the past century from WWII to the Iraq War. These historical novels are populated by ordinary people with extraordinary lives, trying to build a home in a harsh American land. Moderated by Brian Castleberry (Nine Shiny Objects).
Free
Comics
Punk Rock and Hip-Hop have distinct ways of bringing words to life, but both are deeply connected with comics. Rooted in underground DIY culture, the melding of these art forms can challenge the social and personal status quo in profound ways. Bianca Xunise’s Punk Rock Karaoke is a joyous tale of young besties trying to balance band and postgrad lives in Chicago’s Southside. Nate Powell’s time and space-bending Fall Through follows bandmates stuck on an endless tour. Meanwhile, in the real world, Tim Fielder’s and Dr. Walter Greason’s Graphic History of Hip Hop is a dazzling historical exploration of the genre–and a teaching tool to boot! Tune into this Virtual Day chat with moderator Whit Taylor for an experience that dials up to eleven.
Fiction
In her debut Broughtupsy, Christina Cooke introduces 20-year-old Akúa as she attempts to reconstruct her fractured family by flying from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged older sister with her younger brother’s ashes in tow. In Madwoman, Chelsea Bieker delves into the heart of what it really means to survive violence when Clove receives a letter from her incarcerated mother. In Julia Phillips’ Bear, the bond of two sisters is put to the test when a bear unexpectedly appears on their small island, forcing them to re-evaluate their plans as they care for their dying mother. In Malas, Marcela Fuentes introduces us to two women in different decades determined to escape a generational curse and the confines of their lives. Each of these novels presents captivating tales of survival, family, love, and our intensely human devotion to making the most we can out of our lives. Moderated by Lydi Conklin, author of Rainbow, Rainbow.
Free
Fiction
In Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, a writer travels from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in the path of Ayn Rand. In Rejection: Fictions, Tony Tulathimutte explores how our delusions affect our desire for connection in seven connected stories. In How It Works Out, Myriam Lacroix carves out the multiple hypothetical possibilities of a lesbian couple’s relationship. Join these authors on their literary journeys off the beaten path, full of humor, horror, isolation, and a search for meaning. Moderated by Alissa Nutting, screenwriter and author of Tampa.
Free
Non-Fiction
Where better than a library to hold and embody the countless stories that make up a culture? Join Susan Bronson, from the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst MA, Shawn Iwaoka from the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and Susan A. Fletcher, from the McCracken Research Library in Cody, WY for a conversation about saving and celebrating past lives and preserving culture through books, memoirs, oral history transcripts, and even children’s books. Presented by Bloomberg Connects. Moderated by Alex Costas, Bloomberg Connects. You can download the Festival’s digital Bloomberg Connects Guide here.
Free
Fiction
Each season, BKBF presents several international debut authors whom we want to shine the light on for our audience. This year we present Palestinian writer and journalist Yasmin Zaher (The Coin), British Sri Lankan writer Praveen Herat (Between This World and the Next), and Malaysian Australian creative writing instructor Jessica Zhan Mei Yu (But the Girl). Moderated by Brian Vines.
Theatre
Main Stage on Borough Hall Plaza
The New Yorker staff writer Helen Shaw talks with Whiting Award-winning writers Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Public Obscenities), whose eloquent bilingual play, exploring what desire, language, and memory reveal and obscure, was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (The King of Hell’s Palace), whose witty and politically acute work exploring whistleblowing amidst the pressures of globalization and the rural/urban divide won the Yale Drama Series Award and Japan’s Hayakawa Tragicomedy Award; and fiction writer Ada Zhang (The Sorrows of Others), a 2023 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and 2023 Story Prize finalist, whose dazzling work explores the lives of Chinese immigrants and the consequences of choosing a new home and leaving another behind.
Fiction / Poetry
Main Stage on Borough Hall Plaza
Fiction
Amitava Kumar questions what ordinary existence is in his novel My Beloved Life, which tells the story of India’s history over the last 85 years through the lens of a modest father. In Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter, Shiva, a queer Jewish mythology student, retraces four generations of her family’s secrets in Poland to try to understand her mother. In Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, an undocumented immigrant is in her final year at Harvard, but deportation haunts her as she tries to navigate the future, caring for her undocumented grandparents, and a complicated relationship with her home country of Ecuador. Join these authors for a conversation about what it means to write about personal histories in relation to a place and all of the fraught nuances and reckonings that come with it. Moderated by Manuel Gonzales (The Regional Office is Under Attack!)
Poetry
Poets Catherine Barnett (Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space), Nick Flynn (Low), Marie Howe (New and Selected Poems), Dawn Lundy Martin (Instructions for the Lovers) share work that exemplifies poetry’s unique potential to observe everyday life, love, loneliness, and grief. Introduced by Parker Menzimer, Poetry Society of America.
Non-Fiction
It is often said about American life and the media that we occupy two “different realities.” Similarly, we hear about the new synthetic reality of deepfakes, generative AI, and the metaverse. But what if “reality” has always been a shakier proposition than we realized? For this wide-ranging panel, three very different authors, with three very different books, revisit their respective subjects through the lens of the fundamental human question of what is “real.” Emily Nussbaum (Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV) examines the celebreality of unscripted television programming. Kyle Chayka (Filterworld: How Algorithms Flatten Culture) takes on the homogenizing digital reality constructed by social media algorithms. And Legacy Russell (Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us) brings visual culture to the fore, specifically the manufactured reality of racialized images and media representations of Blackness. Moderated by journalist Elizabeth Spiers.
Fiction / International / Non-Fiction
From Mumbai to Tenochtitlan—the ancient capital of the Aztec empire—and a fictional city called Nevers; disparate landscapes come to life in the voices of their inhabitants. In their latest books, authors Devika Rege (Quarterlife), Álvaro Enrigue (You Dreamed of Empires, trans Natasha Wimmer), and Dorothy Tse (Owlish, trans Natascha Bruce) track the collision of worlds between outsiders and city dwellers while probing the internal contradictions that shape the individual—and in turn, their relationship to their surroundings and its people. Moderated by Dennis Zhou, New Yorker Fiction editor.
Fiction / YA
Brooklyn Law School Student Lounge, 250 Joralemon St
Whether it’s creating an alter-ego for yourself in an online role-playing game, traversing the streets of New York to film a mockumentary about Ping-Pong, letting go of perfectionism in the wake of major tragedy, or entering into an admittedly hare-brained love coaching scheme, we often go to great lengths to contend with the expectations of us set by others and ourselves. Join authors Alexene Farol Follmuth (Twelfth Knight), Ali Novak (My Life with the Walter Boys), and Andrew Yang (The Ping-Pong Queen of Chinatown) as they discuss how their teen characters navigate love, friendship, and coming into one’s own in the modern age. Moderated by Farah Naz Rishi (It All Comes Back to You).
Fiction / YA
New York Times bestselling author Amélie Wen Zhao (Song of Silver, Flame Like Night), New York Times bestselling author Dustin Thao (When Haru was Here) and Pura Belpré honoree Camille Gomera-Tavarez (The Girl, The Ring, & The Baseball Bat) discuss how they tackle dreams, grief, epic battles, and relationships in alternate worlds that straddle reality and fantasy. Moderated by Swati Teerdhala (The Boyfriend Wish, The Tiger at Midnight trilogy)
Fiction / Non-Fiction
Beyond just chronicling a life, the memoir has long been a site for the discussion of self-realization and discovery, of inquisition and reckoning. In each of their books, Tracy O’Neill (Woman of Interest), Lucy Sante (I Heard Her Call My Name), and Carvell Wallace (Another Word for Love) explore themselves on the page, digging into their lives past and present to understand their futures, all the while unraveling the multitudes of what it means to be human. Moderated by Dr. Naomi Extra, poet, writer, and scholar at Rutgers University.
Fiction
Main Stage on Borough Hall Plaza
Flawed, sharp, and messy characters on journeys of self-discovery and indulging in sexually explicit love affairs. Two women bond over their shared desire for pain and pleasure in Exhibit by R.O. Kwon. In Tongues by Thomas Grattan follows a young gay man who moves to NYC after a bad breakup, where he gets hired as a dog walker for a wealthy couple and lines begin to blur between employee and lover. In All the World Beside, Garrard Conley explores queerness and religion in a blistering story of two men who fall in love in 18th-century Puritan New England. This panel offers a scorching look at the intricacies of love and passion–and how they can devour us. Moderated by Denne Michele Norris, Editor in Chief of Electric Literature.