This year marks the 26th anniversary of the Harlem Book Fair (HBF), once the largest black book festival in the country. It is also the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, which gave us some of the most significant black authors in the American literary canon. This year’s edition will take place on September 7 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, with additional panels at the Renaissance New York Harlem Hotel. It will symbolize a rebirth of Harlem’s literary culture. Sponsors and supporters include Councilman Yusef Salaam, NYU Press, Harper Collins, Victoria Sanders and Associates, and 4Clay Productions.
Yona Deshommes, President and CEO of Riverchild Media and this year’s co-producer of the event, told Amsterdam News that she is deeply rooted in the Harlem Book Fair. “As a publicist, I have always presented my authors there, so I have a personal connection to the Harlem Book Fair.” She promised that “this year’s festival will be something very special.”
The theme this year is “literary revolution.” “Many of our panels this year will focus on what makes reading and literature revolutionary,” Deshommes explained. For the first time, the Harlem Book Fair will collaborate with the Caribbean Cultural Center Diaspora Institute (CCDI) and its WE LIT! author series. In keeping with the theme, the HBF will feature Haitian authors such as Edwidge Danticat, and visitors will be guided through CCDI’s new Haitian exhibit, Lakay Se Lakay, which means “home is home.” Of course, Haiti, whose revolution ended in 1804, was considered the most successful slave revolt. It was also the first Black republic and the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere. There will also be a series of panels throughout the day and a special children’s corner with author readings, activities and face painting.
Like many other services, products, organizations and events aimed at African Americans, the Harlem Book Fair was founded when someone saw a gap in the service provided to the broader population compared to African Americans. “I’ve always been an avid reader of books. I would read the New York Times Book Review, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books and the first thing I did was pull up the table of contents to see what books applied to me. Most of the time there weren’t any,” said Harlem Book Fair founder Max Rodriguez. Amsterdam News
To address this discrepancy, Rodriguez first founded the Quarterly Black Book Review (QBR). When Rodriguez, the son of a welder and a housekeeper who was born and raised in Brooklyn, moved his work to Harlem, he noticed another glaring gap. “I said, ‘So where is the festival that celebrates our stories, that celebrates our writers, that celebrates the Hall of Renaissance and the writers of the Hall of Renaissance?'” In July 1998, he founded the Harlem Book Fair.
Part of the Harlem Book Fair’s function, Rodriguez says, is to partner with traditional publishers and bring them an audience. “It’s very important that we showcase our stories through our authors to make sure there’s an audience for those authors to tell those stories to.” Rodriguez also sees the Harlem Book Fair as a vehicle to highlight diaspora literary culture. “We have authors from Canada, from France, from Nigeria, from the Caribbean. So part of our job is also to discover new voices around the world. One of our slogans is Global I Am. “I want to expand our own perception of ourselves as people of color. Part of the book fair’s job is to discover and bring those voices.”
Deshommes, who is also a writer and describes herself as a lifelong book lover, added, “I think Harlem and the community deserve to have an event like this given its history. The Harlem Renaissance was revolutionary in itself when you think about that time. You have Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, so why not continue that legacy and bring literature and culture to the Harlem community?” One of her favorite classics is “The Alchemist” because it teaches people to “learn about their life’s work.” One of her favorite contemporary books is Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming.” “They gave me a blueprint for my own life, work and being, and allowed me to say yes to the universe,” she said.
Rodriguez admits that his literary preferences include a penchant for “unusual” books. One of them is the hard-to-categorize novel “Cutting Lisa” by acclaimed writer Percival Everett. (His later book, “Erasure,” was adapted into the critically acclaimed 2023 film “American Fiction,” starring Jeffrey Wright and Erika Alexander.) Rodriguez also recommended “Two Thousand Seasons” by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. “It’s about us as a community over 2,000 years,” Rodriguez said. “It’s pretty amazing, very moving.”
For more information about the Harlem Book Fair, visit www.harlembookfair.com.
