Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, organizer, and change agent. Her essay “Red” weaves a meandering tale that touches on Sandy’s coming of age through rememberings of family lore, food, and key engagements with cultural organizing anchored through sorrel. The essay considers the ubiquitous staple Caribbean holiday drink as a microcosm of the collisions of political histories, desire and ancestral memory. Sandy's work across disciplines delves into t...

Of all contest entries, Bush Bath is perhaps the embodiment of the 2025 festival contest theme, Remedies of Root. Penned by Brandon McIvor, it traces a man on a visit to Trinidad to see his dying mother, who abandoned him as a child. He delays the meeting, instead taking a symbolic "bush bath" in a forest pool to cleanse his pain. There, a recovered memory reveals his mother didn't save him from danger, but first let him go. As the story unfolds, McIvor's main character must decide whether to...

Quality Time by Kodi-Anne Brown is the winner of the BCLF Short Story contest for 2025. Described by judge, Patricia Powell, as "...simple and quiet and unsettling and tender and wonderfully turned," it follows a girl on a rare visit with her father who endures his shallow, rehearsed affection. When she is left with a babysister to care for unexpectedly, something unplanned happens. Quality Time confronts the tension common in familiar relationships within the Caribbean familial ecosystem wit...

On the verge of adulthood, Rafi attends the Lyceum, a school for the psionically gifted. Rafi possesses mental abilities that might benefit people . . . or control them. Some wish to help Rafi wield his powers responsibly; others see him as a threat to be contained. Rafi’s only freedom at the Lyceum is Wallrunning: a game of speed and agility played on vast vertical surfaces riddled with variable gravity fields. Serendipity and Ntenman are also students at the Lyceum, but unlike Rafi, they c...

On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognisable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. Down below is the barrack, a ramshackle building of wood and tin, divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops - Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, who live hard lives of backbreaking work, grinding poverty and devotion to faith. When Dalton Changoor goes missing and Marlee's safety is com...

‘Please Take One’ follows Lloyd, an elderly resident of Chaguanas, as he embarks on a series of desperate attempts to capture the attention of an aloof supermarket clerk. Portia Subran is a writer and artist from Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago.

A mythic love story set in Trinidad, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's radiant debut is a masterwork of lush imagination and exuberant storytelling—a spellbinding and hopeful novel about inheritance, loss, and love's seismic power to heal. In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years ...

Kai Muhammad is an avid BCLF reader who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Zo and the Forest of Secrets is one of his favorite middle grade level Caribbean books. He was overjoyed for the opportunity to ask Alake, the book’s writer, some of the many burning questions he had about the thrilling adventures of her characters Listen now as Kai and Alake hold court to chop shop about the thrilling story and possible future plans for her brave and plucky characters.

Enjoy readings from The Chaos, Derron Sandy's poetry pamphlet, where his subjects are the individuals and communities who suffer most from injustice, poverty and violence in contemporary Trinidad. Using a variety of forms and approaches, the poems describe scene after painful scene – from the murder of an abusive boss and a killing at a gang member’s wake to a child’s suicide and the finding of a missing person’s body in a barrel – evoking the ‘chaos’ in each case with eloquence, clarity and ...

Twelve year-old Serenity Noah has never told anyone about her recurring nightmares -- the haunting images of silver butterflies whose flapping wings drive away all sound, leaving only suffocating silence in their wake. Her parents already favor her "perfect" younger brother, Peace, and she doesn't want to be seen as the "problem" child. Instead, Serenity's found a productive way to channel her fears: creating a horror movie as scary as her nightmares. When Peace suddenly becomes afraid of th...

Winner 2022 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean “The Fix” is a story of love, obsession, and obeah that follows a young woman as she seeks advice from an obeah practitioner. She has fallen in love with her neighbor, but rather than compete with his current lover directly, she looks to magic to steal him for herself. The obeah woman teachesthe young woman how to infuse her food with stronger and stronger spells until she fixes her man for good. Alexia Tolas is a Bah...

Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican writer based in France. Her first collection of short stories, Satellite City, and her novel Sweetheart have both won Commonwealth literary prizes. Sweetheart has been translated into French (Trésor) and was awarded the Prix Carbet des lycéens in 2017. Her most recent novel is A Million Aunties - longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. Her work has also appeared in a range of literary magazines and in anthologies such as Stories from Blue Latitudes, The Ox...

In Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear and nuanced, and as readers move through the collection, the various themes cohere into a multil...

"What you’re about to hear is the opening of my novel-in-progress, The Price of Two Pence. It begins in Battersea, January 1975, on the Number 77 bus, where Ronald Jones — a Jamaican bus conductor — asks two young men for a two-pence fare for their dog. What happens next alters his life, and the life of his sister Nancy, forever. The novel traces the aftermath of that moment across London and rural Jamaica, exploring the grief and rage of a family, the silences of a city that tried to forget...

We at the BCLF are proud to mark the release of “Getting Through: New and Selected Poems” by Mervyn Taylor, an extraordinary collection which gathers decades of lyrical mastery into one definitive volume, with this special episode of Cocoa Pod. Described as “a treasure trove… capturing the beauty and nuances of ordinary and extraordinary lives,” this poetry collection is a profound offering of Caribbean life, exploring themes of love, death, migration, aging, and grief with Taylor’s signatur...

Ever Since We Small – A Reading by Celeste Mohammed In this episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod, award-winning writer Celeste Mohammed reads from her second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small. Spanning generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family, the book follows the Gopauls from Jayanti’s journey as a girmitiya to the struggles of her descendants in modern Trinidad. Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the Gopauls' inheritance of pain into a "generati...