BCLF Cocoa Pod

Season 4 of BCLF Cocoa Pod opens with the classic short story, Ascot, by writing legend,Olive Senior. Originally anthologized in her landmark collection 'Summer Lightning and Other Stories', Ascot, as all of Season 4, has been enhanced for contemporary audiences with cinematic sound design by Odiyo, but keeps close to the original Cocoa Pod ethos of authentic Caribbean accent narration.

This short story is about about Ascot, a Jamaican trickster with big dreams who returns to his childhood village with a bunch of surprises to the delight and dismay of quite a few. It's sure to transport you back to the day you first read Summer Lightning or to the cherished memories of the bucolic charm of a bygone era in Jamaica. 

Olive Senior's classic collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories is still taught in schools today and remains a living archive of a cherished era of Caribbean history. And today the oral experience of this episode proves that her lyrical prose was definitely always waiting to be told to us, just like the elders did long ago.

Narrated by Sashawna Thompson.

Sound design by Odiyo

Cocoa Pod Season 4 was made possible with funds from Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant.

Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins—resurrected from death and wiped of their memories—have only three unbreakable vows.

First, the contract must be just. Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. The third and the simplest: once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? There's hell to pay--literally. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen’s newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn’t supposed to remember and a vow she can’t forget.

In this reading, we meet the undead assassin Eveen as she readies to set out on a job. Gliding high above Tal Abisi from rooftop to rooftop, she surveys the night Festival of the Clockwork King--where careful readers will catch glimpses of a mashup of New Orleans Mardi Gras, Carriacou Shakespeare Mas, Trinidad Canboulay, allusions to Lord Blakie's "Steelband Clash"--and more. 

Phenderson Djéli Clark is the award-winning and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon nominated author of the Abeni’s Song series and A Master of Djinn, and the novellas The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums, and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories have appeared in venues such as Tor.com and anthologies including, Hidden Youth and Black Boy Joy.

Tracing a lineage from Ragga Soca, Rapso, and Extempo to legendary carnival speech characters like the Pierrot Grenade, Baby Doll, and Midnight Robber, this podcast proves that spoken word is a cultural force and tradition in Trinidad and Tobago. Join amílcar peter sanatan as he wanders through the steelpan yards of East Port-of-Spain, the ache of tabanca  and bombastic badness in "Robber Talk." Immerse yourself in the rhythms, songs, and metaphors of a people who claim transform every street and period of history into a stage.

amílcar peter sanatan is an interdisciplinary Caribbean artist, educator and activist. He is from Trinidad and Tobago and currently working between East Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Helsinki, Finland. He won the Bridget Jones Caribbean Arts Award for poetry and his creative nonfiction was shortlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Prize for Caribbean Writers. sanatan participated in scholarly and arts-based fellowships with Bocas Lit Fest, Journal of International Women’s Studies and Promundo. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: About Kingston and The Black Flâneur: Diary of Dizain Poems, Anthropology of Hurt.

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 the human story - through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual. Her creative practice often is an examination of the ways history, economics, migration and other social forces and constructs have shaped modern realities. Her aim is to use the visual, written and performing arts to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them and to lift us all to a higher state of ontological and spiritual wholeness in the process. Sandy has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University and Pratt Institute.

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 with dignified candor and the redemptive beauty of forgiveness. Despite the protagonist's well-placed resentment, new quiet bonds are formed which imbues the reader and the story's characters with a potential for renewal and hope.

Kodi-Anne Brown is a Jamaica-born writer, editor, and community specialist whose work is grounded in arts, culture, and community empowerment. With academic and professional interests spanning postcolonial futurity, decolonial ecology, and multiculturalism, Brown’s writing interrogates new ways of relating to the world and expressing the self. Fluent in both English and French, she continues to expand her practice through opportunities in communications, media, community engagement, and the literary arts.

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 confront her with this painful truth or offer her peace. 

Brandon Mc Ivor was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago and holds a BSc in English Literature from New York University. He currently teaches English in Ehime, Japan, while continuing to build a literary practice that explores the craft and circulation of storytelling. His work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and in Akashic Books’ flash fiction series, among other publications. He was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize in 2020 for his work Finger, Spinster, Serial Killer. Both writer and marketer, Mc Ivor is deeply interested in the forms and voices through which stories are told, seeking to move audiences through fiction, poetry, and creative communication alike.