Saturday or Sunday Access

Includes lunch & snacks, lounge access, a chance to meet your favorite author

The full experience - Includes lunch & snacks, lounge access, a chance to meet your favorite author on both days.

Location: Co-presented with MoCADA

Time: 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Event Description:

Long before algorithms and streaming playlists accelerated the spread of Caribbean music around the world, artists like Sister Nancy were creating the sounds scratched into vinyl that would come to define generations. Today, her voice reverberates within generations and cultures, sampled by some of the world’s biggest artists and embraced by audiences who may not realise they are listening to the work of a Jamaican pioneer.

In conversation with Jamaican editor and publisher Tanya Batson-Savage, Sister Nancy reflects on a remarkable life and career that stretches from a strict religious upbringing in Jamaica to her emergence as one of dancehall’s pioneering female deejays. Together they explore the enduring influence of Rastafarianism on her life and work, the challenges of forging a path in a male-dominated industry, the making of her biopic What a Bam Bam, and the resurgence of her music through sampling, streaming and a new generation of listeners. Sister Nancy’s story also reveals the struggle for artists to maintain ownership of the work they create. After years of seeing her music used without permission, she fought to reclaim her rights and secured long-overdue recognition and compensation for one of the most sampled songs in popular culture. Her victory speaks to a wider history in which Caribbean artists have shaped global music while fighting to have their authorship, intellectual property and economic value fully recognised.

Presented as part of BCLF’s 2026 theme, One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future, this conversation pays homage to the collective forces responsible for music’s survival across generations. Artists, sound systems, producers, dancers, listeners and diasporic communities have all helped Jamaican music travel, endure and continually find new life.

Sister Nancy’s journey stands within the Caribbean’s indomitable contribution to global sound and cultural trendsetting. Her no-nonsense approach to craft, discipline and excellence reflects a deep commitment to integrity, honour and the principle that one’s word carries weight. From Jamaica to communities across the diaspora, Caribbean music has transformed the world’s cultural imagination. Her life and work offer a powerful story of faith, creative courage, artistic ownership and a legacy that remains firmly in her own name.

Location: TBD

Time: 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm

Featuring Tao Leigh Goffe (JA), Devon Taylor (JABBEM) in conversation with Dantae Elliott (JA)

The beach, despite its early setting in the Caribbean as the port of arrival marking an indefinite future of terror and toil, in the 20th century became synonymous with freedom and rest. It now adorns postcards and holiday brochures, promising beauty and escape. For many Caribbean communities, the shoreline has recently returned to a site of restriction, displacement and loss, this time echoing the peril that modern tourism models bring. As the industry expands, private development reshapes coastlines, climate change accelerates erosion and rising seas, and access to the beach is increasingly a prize commodity. What was once publicly accessible is too often treated as the foray of the exclusive and wealthy.

The questions raised by Beach inna Bondage extend far beyond the Caribbean. They form the top tenors of cries in Brooklyn, where neighbourhoods built by generations of working-class and immigrant communities are being systematically toppled by aggressive gentrification, rising costs and the gradual erosion of belonging. Though the landscapes differ, the underlying struggle is strikingly familiar. Who has the right to remain? Who benefits from redevelopment? What happens when the places that shape our identities are transformed beyond recognition?

In partnership with Grist, BCLF presents the New York launch of the documentary ‘Beach Inna Bondage: The Fight for Jamaica’s Coastlines’, bringing together important voices to examine the shared forces of dispossession unfolding across islands and cities alike. This conversation considers the beach as a public commons, cultural inheritance and a measure of whose lives are valued while it investigates the power and legal structures that make the onslaught possible. It considers stewardship, the implications of class, the politics of land, the future of our shared spaces and the collective work required to protect them.ed seating, and access to VIP‑only areas.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 2:45 pm - 3:45 pm

Guest Authors: Richard Georges(TT|BVI), Traci O’Dea (US), Hadiya Sewer in conversation with Sayu Bhojwani (BZ)

The Virgin Islands are often imagined through the lens of paradise - marketable beauty, celebrated hospitality and history neatly pressed into sepia postcards. 'Virgin Islands Noir,' the newest volume in Akashic Books' acclaimed Noir Series, offers another portrait of this vacation paradise. Decolonial at its core, the stories in this collection unsettle the reader and meander urgently through narrow, shadowy side streets, rendering the place and its people as unmistakably human.

Bringing together fifteen writers from across the British and United States Virgin Islands, the anthology refuses the colonial boundaries that have long divided an interconnected archipelago. Instead, it presents a literary landscape shaped by shared histories, family ties, migration and the sea itself. The collection embraces contradiction, revealing a place where beauty and violence, belonging and displacement, tenderness and danger exist side by side.

In keeping with Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival's 2026 theme, One Hand Don't Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future, this conversation illuminates what collective storytelling makes possible. This conversation insists that there is no single voice that can speak on behalf of the Virgin Islands. That there is a dangerous beauty within the hidden chaos. That it takes many writers, perspectives and imaginations to illuminate the fullness of a place whose stories have too often been simplified, commercialised or muted.

Belizean writer and professor Sayu Bhojwani leads a conversation with contributors Richard Georges and Traci O'Dea on writing the Caribbean beyond tourism, the responsibilities of representing home, and the power of anthologies to create literary worlds that are richer than any one narrative alone.

Location: Brooklyn Children's Museum

Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Guest Authors: Imani Perry (US), Maisy Card (JA)

This conversation brings together African-American and Caribbean writers to examine the long and complicated history of complex relations between their communities, one marked by solidarity, and also more interestingly, by tension, exchange, and mutual transformation. From Marcus Garvey’s organizing in the United States to the gains secured through the Civil Rights Movement that reshaped the possibilities of migration for the global majority, the histories of African-American and Caribbean peoples are inseparable. Through fiction and lived experience, these writers explore how narratives of rivalry obscure deeper truths of dependence, inheritance, and shared futures. Under the guiding principle of One Hand Don’t Clap, the panel invites us to consider what becomes possible when these histories are read in relation rather than the long-established tendency of doing so in isolation.

Location: Brooklyn Children's Museum

Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Guest Authors: Imani Perry (US), Maisy Card (JA)

This conversation brings together African-American and Caribbean writers to examine the long and complicated history of complex relations between their communities, one marked by solidarity, and also more interestingly, by tension, exchange, and mutual transformation. From Marcus Garvey’s organizing in the United States to the gains secured through the Civil Rights Movement that reshaped the possibilities of migration for the global majority, the histories of African-American and Caribbean peoples are inseparable. Through fiction and lived experience, these writers explore how narratives of rivalry obscure deeper truths of dependence, inheritance, and shared futures. Under the guiding principle of One Hand Don’t Clap, the panel invites us to consider what becomes possible when these histories are read in relation rather than the long-established tendency of doing so in isolation.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 12 noon - 1:15 pm

Guest Authors: Chef Andre Fowles (JA), Marie Mitchell (JA) , Brigid Washington (TT), Brooklyn Supported Agriculture

Food, more than nourishment, is perhaps the most common expression of love in the Caribbean often saying what words cannot. There is nothing fast about food in this tradition. An authentic Caribbean meal is usually painstakingly prepared, often starting as either a harvest from a subsistence garden or ‘vikkles’ sourced from a local market. Family recipes are sheathed in the pages of memory, undocumented treasures, orally dispensed, handed down like family heirlooms with its source of origin predating any survivor’s memory. Stylistic variations of a meal are sacred artefacts and living archives, making both process and outcome one of the Caribbean’s most enduring narrative forms. The transfer of knowledge of authentic Caribbean food demands apprenticeship from all initiants, with a rigorous course of study involving prep, measurements and seasoning calculated according to ancestral acumen. Skilled cooks in Caribbean domestic kitchen are not born - they emerge - tested by trial in the fiery crucible of invention, repetition and necessity. The Caribbean kitchen is a site of both memory and invention.

Sunday Lunch brings together Andre Fowles, Brigid Washington, and Marie Mitchell, chefs, writers, cultural thinkers and community food advocates, who have built praiseworthy careers from the crucible of the Caribbean food tradition. Their contemporary approaches to their craft are rooted in their culture and lore and tell the story of survival, creolisation, cooperation and exchange. Under the festival’s theme, One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future, the panel examines how recipes become vessels of inheritance and adaptation, preserving culture while evolving through movement, scarcity, and contact with other worlds.

Sunday Lunch confronts the tensions that shape contemporary Caribbean food culture: authenticity versus experimentation, preservation versus reinterpretation, purity versus transformation and the creative possibilities produced through creolisation and migration. Together, the panelists explore the past, the present and what new futures are being imagined through the act of cooking, gathering, and feeding one another. The conversation also considers how longstanding Caribbean practices of cultivation, local sourcing, and community feeding continue to inform contemporary conversations around food sovereignty, sustainability, and equitable access to good food in urban communities.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 12 noon - 1:15 pm

Guest Authors: Chef Andre Fowles (JA), Marie Mitchell (JA) , Brigid Washington (TT), Brooklyn Supported Agriculture

Food, more than nourishment, is perhaps the most common expression of love in the Caribbean often saying what words cannot. There is nothing fast about food in this tradition. An authentic Caribbean meal is usually painstakingly prepared, often starting as either a harvest from a subsistence garden or ‘vikkles’ sourced from a local market. Family recipes are sheathed in the pages of memory, undocumented treasures, orally dispensed, handed down like family heirlooms with its source of origin predating any survivor’s memory. Stylistic variations of a meal are sacred artefacts and living archives, making both process and outcome one of the Caribbean’s most enduring narrative forms. The transfer of knowledge of authentic Caribbean food demands apprenticeship from all initiants, with a rigorous course of study involving prep, measurements and seasoning calculated according to ancestral acumen. Skilled cooks in Caribbean domestic kitchen are not born - they emerge - tested by trial in the fiery crucible of invention, repetition and necessity. The Caribbean kitchen is a site of both memory and invention.

Sunday Lunch brings together Andre Fowles, Brigid Washington, and Marie Mitchell, chefs, writers, cultural thinkers and community food advocates, who have built praiseworthy careers from the crucible of the Caribbean food tradition. Their contemporary approaches to their craft are rooted in their culture and lore and tell the story of survival, creolisation, cooperation and exchange. Under the festival’s theme, One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future, the panel examines how recipes become vessels of inheritance and adaptation, preserving culture while evolving through movement, scarcity, and contact with other worlds.

Sunday Lunch confronts the tensions that shape contemporary Caribbean food culture: authenticity versus experimentation, preservation versus reinterpretation, purity versus transformation and the creative possibilities produced through creolisation and migration. Together, the panelists explore the past, the present and what new futures are being imagined through the act of cooking, gathering, and feeding one another. The conversation also considers how longstanding Caribbean practices of cultivation, local sourcing, and community feeding continue to inform contemporary conversations around food sovereignty, sustainability, and equitable access to good food in urban communities.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm

Guest Authors: Lauren Francis-Sharma (TT), Nicole Dennis-Benn (JA), Edwidge Danticat (HT) in conversation with Dantae Elliott (JA)

Across the Caribbean diaspora, forms of shared care have helped families survive the pain and impact of migration. This care, in the form of informal and formal socioeconomic systems, has absorbed the shock and fracture families have experienced, often testing the strength of emotional, psychological and financial structures of entire communities beyond borders, generations, and households. This conversation, anchored by Caribbean fictional texts, explores the emotional and social realities of the “barrel child”, a term first coined in the mid-1980s. The term quickly became popular because it centered the most visible material artefact of the phenomenon - the barrel - a durable, waterproof, multiuse vessel which contained essential and luxury items, food, clothing and brand name sneakers - for the sustenance of the charges and often wider, extended networks left behind. Barrel children were raised on remittances, phone calls, grandparents, neighbours, memory, and absence.

Buttressed by the scholarship of Barrel Poetics by Dantae Elliott, and under the guiding principle of One Hand Don’t Clap, the panel counts the cost of ‘betterment’ to family and community, weighed against the balance of what is gained, lost, and inherited in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm

Guest Authors: Lauren Francis-Sharma (TT), Nicole Dennis-Benn (JA), Edwidge Danticat (HT) in conversation with Dantae Elliott (JA)

Across the Caribbean diaspora, forms of shared care have helped families survive the pain and impact of migration. This care, in the form of informal and formal socioeconomic systems, has absorbed the shock and fracture families have experienced, often testing the strength of emotional, psychological and financial structures of entire communities beyond borders, generations, and households. This conversation, anchored by Caribbean fictional texts, explores the emotional and social realities of the “barrel child”, a term first coined in the mid-1980s. The term quickly became popular because it centered the most visible material artefact of the phenomenon - the barrel - a durable, waterproof, multiuse vessel which contained essential and luxury items, food, clothing and brand name sneakers - for the sustenance of the charges and often wider, extended networks left behind. Barrel children were raised on remittances, phone calls, grandparents, neighbours, memory, and absence.

Buttressed by the scholarship of Barrel Poetics by Dantae Elliott, and under the guiding principle of One Hand Don’t Clap, the panel counts the cost of ‘betterment’ to family and community, weighed against the balance of what is gained, lost, and inherited in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Guest Authors: Randy Winston (US), Jovanna Brinck (PR),Johnny Temple(US) and Mariah Stovall (US)

The path towards a finished book bears signposts of a community of professionals, not always visible, along the way. For many aspiring and emerging writers, understanding the publishing industry can feel like navigating unfamiliar terrain. Agent, editor, publisher, publicist are titles that are frequently invoked but rarely explained, leaving many uncertain about how stories become books and actually make their way into readers' hands.

Who Does What? brings together some of the leading names within the NYC wriitng world to demystify the publishing process and unpack the distinct function each plays in identifying, shaping, championing, and connecting books with readers. Despite the deceptively simple question at its threshold, it is an invitation to explore the inner chambers of publishing unfolding into a deeper examination of advocacy, gatekeeping, editorial vision, marketing, and the collaborative labour that transforms a manuscript into a published work.

Under the festival's theme, One Hand Don't Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future, the panel explores publishing as an act of collective creation, exposing two truths–that many people work on a single book and the interconnectedness of a literary ecosystem. For writers at every stage of their journey, Who Does What? is a conversation to understand publishing as a pathway to print and as a practice of interdependence where every successful book is the product of many hands.

Location: Center for Fiction

Time: 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Guest Authors: Randy Winston (US), Jovanna Brinck (PR),Johnny Temple(US) and Mariah Stovall (US)

The path towards a finished book bears signposts of a community of professionals, not always visible, along the way. For many aspiring and emerging writers, understanding the publishing industry can feel like navigating unfamiliar terrain. Agent, editor, publisher, publicist are titles that are frequently invoked but rarely explained, leaving many uncertain about how stories become books and actually make their way into readers' hands.

Who Does What? brings together some of the leading names within the NYC wriitng world to demystify the publishing process and unpack the distinct function each plays in identifying, shaping, championing, and connecting books with readers. Despite the deceptively simple question at its threshold, it is an invitation to explore the inner chambers of publishing unfolding into a deeper examination of advocacy, gatekeeping, editorial vision, marketing, and the collaborative labour that transforms a manuscript into a published work.

Under the festival's theme, One Hand Don't Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future, the panel explores publishing as an act of collective creation, exposing two truths–that many people work on a single book and the interconnectedness of a literary ecosystem. For writers at every stage of their journey, Who Does What? is a conversation to understand publishing as a pathway to print and as a practice of interdependence where every successful book is the product of many hands.

Location: Ubuntu Gardens - MoCADA

Time: 6:45 pm - 8:00 pm

Guest Authors: Cheryl Boyce-Taylor (TT), Yesha Townsend (BM), Atibon Nazaire (HT), Jive Poetic (JA|CU), Rico Frederick(TT|GD) feat. Dj Cooper Libre (TT)

Center for Fiction

6:00pm - 6:30pm

Guest Authors: Cindy Allman 'Book of Cinz' (JA), Sharon Velez-Diodonet ‘Book Dragon’ (PR)

The archipelago has never been a barrier to Caribbean peoples, separated by the

sea we mobilized the waves as a highway. Long before the internet, writers, traders, and

communities moved between islands and mainland territories carrying stories, trade goods,and circulating ideas. Kinship networks stretched across vast distances, sustained by the deliberate act of sailing towards one another.

Today, the literary networks of the Caribbean operate on new waterways. Hashtags are routes and book trends are currents. Bookstagram and BookTok have become the harbours where writers from the region, the diaspora and beyond, gather synchronously, to share thoughts on new fiction, build community, and claim narrative authority over their own stories. The Digital Village has collapsed distance, but does this also collapse our difference? Writers from across the diaspora and throughout the region now navigate an instantaneous literary commons, one where regional exchange through a single post, a tagged recommendation, a thread of conversation.

These new waterways are neither neutral nor uncontested. Social media platforms reshape how Caribbean literature circulates, who gains visibility, how trends are set, and which voices

accumulate reach. The speed of digital culture can obscure the careful, ancestral work of literary lineage. Algorithms govern discovery in ways the ocean never did. Still Caribbean writers and readers have seized these tools to build autonomous networks.

The Digital Village brings together Cindy Allman (bookofcinz), Stephanie Ramlogan, and Sharon Diodonet writers, readers, and digital culture advocates who are navigating, shaping, and imagining the future of the Caribbean literary community online. Under the festival’s theme, ‘One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future,’ these panelists examine how social media has become both archive and agora for West Indian letters.

The conversation explores the tensions that animate digital Caribbean literary culture:

algorithmic visibility versus organic community building, global exposure versus regional

specificity, the risk of homogenizing our dynamic region into a singular ‘Caribbean’ digital text, and the ways that Caribbean writers are using social platforms to imagine new literary futures. Together, they ask: What does it mean to sail these digital waterways? How do Caribbean literary networks operate when proximity is no longer geographic?

Center for Fiction

6:00pm - 6:30pm

Guest Authors: Cindy Allman 'Book of Cinz' (JA), Sharon Velez-Diodonet ‘Book Dragon’ (PR)

The archipelago has never been a barrier to Caribbean peoples, separated by the

sea we mobilized the waves as a highway. Long before the internet, writers, traders, and

communities moved between islands and mainland territories carrying stories, trade goods,and circulating ideas. Kinship networks stretched across vast distances, sustained by the deliberate act of sailing towards one another.

Today, the literary networks of the Caribbean operate on new waterways. Hashtags are routes and book trends are currents. Bookstagram and BookTok have become the harbours where writers from the region, the diaspora and beyond, gather synchronously, to share thoughts on new fiction, build community, and claim narrative authority over their own stories. The Digital Village has collapsed distance, but does this also collapse our difference? Writers from across the diaspora and throughout the region now navigate an instantaneous literary commons, one where regional exchange through a single post, a tagged recommendation, a thread of conversation.

These new waterways are neither neutral nor uncontested. Social media platforms reshape how Caribbean literature circulates, who gains visibility, how trends are set, and which voices

accumulate reach. The speed of digital culture can obscure the careful, ancestral work of literary lineage. Algorithms govern discovery in ways the ocean never did. Still Caribbean writers and readers have seized these tools to build autonomous networks.

The Digital Village brings together Cindy Allman (bookofcinz), Stephanie Ramlogan, and Sharon Diodonet writers, readers, and digital culture advocates who are navigating, shaping, and imagining the future of the Caribbean literary community online. Under the festival’s theme, ‘One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future,’ these panelists examine how social media has become both archive and agora for West Indian letters.

The conversation explores the tensions that animate digital Caribbean literary culture:

algorithmic visibility versus organic community building, global exposure versus regional

specificity, the risk of homogenizing our dynamic region into a singular ‘Caribbean’ digital text, and the ways that Caribbean writers are using social platforms to imagine new literary futures. Together, they ask: What does it mean to sail these digital waterways? How do Caribbean literary networks operate when proximity is no longer geographic?