{"id":347190,"date":"2026-09-15T09:26:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/347190\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T09:26:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:26:36","slug":"in-brooklyn-caribbean-writers-are-imagining-what-comes-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/347190\/","title":{"rendered":"In Brooklyn, Caribbean Writers Are Imagining What Comes Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend, Brooklyn’s literary community gathered for five days of conversations, readings and celebrations of Caribbean writing and culture.<\/p>\n

For five days this September, Brooklyn became a gathering place for writers, publishers and readers considering what it meant to imagine a Caribbean future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival<\/a>, now in its eighth year, returned Sept.\u00a09-13 with a theme drawn from a familiar Caribbean proverb: \u201cOne Hand Don\u2019t Clap.\u201d This year\u2019s festival, “One Hand Don\u2019t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future,” asked what could be created through collective memory, cultural exchange and the stories carried across borders.<\/p>\n

Held across multiple venues, including The Center for Fiction, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) and the Brooklyn Public Library for Arts and Culture, the festival has found several homes in a borough shaped by generations of Caribbean migration and cultural exchange.<\/p>\n

The opening keynote, \u201cLaureates of the Caribbean: Side A,\u201d brought together Jamaican dancehall pioneer Sister Nancy and editor and publisher Tanya Batson-Savage. Their conversation touched on worldwide impact of Sister Nancy\u2019s career and the circulation of Jamaican music, including the complicated questions of ownership and recognition that accompanied the genre’s\u00a0global influence.<\/p>\n

Other programs turned toward the histories and experiences that shaped Caribbean communities across the region and its diaspora.\u00a0The\u00a0festival also examined how Caribbean identities were represented and circulated. \u201cVirgin Islands Noir\u201d brought publisher Johnny Temple in conversation with writers Hadiya Sewer and\u00a0Traci O\u2019Dea to discuss an anthology that challenged the familiar image of the Virgin Islands as an idyllic tourist destination.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“There is a repetition\u00a0in colonialism that fundamentally shifts even our sense of how we understand what it means to be human,” Sewer said.\u00a0“And I think a lot about writing in this way, but also what it means to constantly occupy these threshold spaces. It’s like traveling the horizon line. The threshold in the portal between the living and the dead, the known, the unknown, the sea and the sky.”<\/p>\n

\"img_0431\"
\nAmina Washington is announced as the winner of the 2026 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer\u2019s Prize. Photo: Kimberlean Donis for BK Reader <\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s annual Short Fiction Contest\u00a0announced Amina Washington as the 2026 winner of the Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer\u2019s Prize and Zephrine Royer as the recipient of the 2026 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

The expansiveness and breadth of possibility is arguably the festival\u2019s most compelling quality. Caribbean literature was presented not as a fixed category organized around a single island, language or national history, but as something continually reshaped by people and movement.<\/p>\n

Caribbean communities have long helped define Brooklyn\u2019s neighborhoods, cultural institutions and public life. The festival added literature to that living history, creating a space where stories from across the Caribbean and its diaspora could meet the city that had become home to so many of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne Hand Don\u2019t Clap\u201d was a\u00a0reminder that stories endure through exchange\u00a0across generations and through the people willing to carry them forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This weekend, Brooklyn’s literary community gathered for five days of conversations, readings and celebrations of Caribbean writing and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[129886,98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-347190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-artsculturebrooklynbrooklyn-public-librarythe-center-for-fictionmocada-gallerysister-nancythe-brooklyn-caribbean-literary-festival","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}