BCLF Cocoa Pod

‘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.

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 come from communities where such abilities are valued. Serendipity finds the Lyceum as much a prison as a school, and she yearns for a meaningful life beyond its gates. Ntenman, with his quick tongue, quicker mind, and a willingness to bend if not break the rules, has no problem fitting in. But he too has his reasons for wanting to escape.

Now the three friends are about to experience a moment of violent change as seething tensions between rival star-faring civilizations come to a head. For Serendipity, this change will challenge her ideas of community and self. For Ntenman, it will open new opportunities and new dangers. And for Rafi, given a chance to train with some of the best Wallrunners in the galaxy, it will lead to the discovery that there is more to Wallrunning than he ever suspected . . . and more to himself than he ever dreamed.

Barbadian writer Dr. Karen Lord is the author of Redemption in Indigo, which won the William L. Crawford Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her other works include the science fiction novels The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, and the crime-fantasy novel Unraveling. She edited the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean.

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 compromised, farmhand Hans is lured by the promise of a handsome stipend to move to the farm as watchman. But as the mystery of Dalton's disappearance unfolds their lives become hellishly entwined, and the small community altered forever.

Hungry Ghosts is a mesmerising novel about violence, religion, family and class, rooted in the wild and pastoral landscape of colonial central Trinidad.

Kevin Jared Hosein is the author, most recently, of Hungry Ghosts, fiction winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It had also been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is a two-time winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, regionally in 2015 and overall in 2018. His writing has been published in numerous outlets and anthologies, and he now writes full-time from his home in 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 of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out.
 
Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both. Newly shorn of his dreadlocks and his past, and determined to prove himself, Darwin finds himself adrift in a city electric with possibility and danger.
 
Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, an ancient and sprawling cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both.

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 compassion. 

Sandy offers no easy solutions to the social problems behind these incidents, but his poems are nevertheless imbued with a profound faith, hope and sense of redemption.

Derron Sandy is an award-winning Trinbagonian performance poet. In 2021 he won the National Poetry Slam title in Trinidad and Tobago and was long-listed for Bocas Lit Fest’s Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. His book for children, A Story of Hope (2020), was published by the Pan American Development Foundation as part of a project building greater understanding between host and migrant communities in the Caribbean. Sandy is Artistic Director of youth spoken word and theatre organisations The 2 Cents Movement and The Quays Foundation, an actor – and an avid basketball fan. The Chaos is his first pamphlet of poems.

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant.

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 the dark and refuses to sleep alone, their parents take him away for "treatment" on Duppy Island. Serenity has a very bad feeling about the mysterious island and the facility's creepy leader, Dr. Whisper. And when she sees a silver butterfly from her nightmares in the forbidden forest she realizes that something is seriously, dangerously awry.

But nothing could've prepared Serenity for the truth: the island is home to douens -- faceless children with backward feet who are trapped in limbo between the world of the living and the land of the dead. And unless Serenity acts soon, her brother is going to join their ranks... 

Shakirah Bourne is a Bajan author and filmmaker. She once shot a movie scene in a cave with bats during an earthquake, but is too scared to watch horror movies. She is a recipient of the Governor General Award for Excellence in Literary Fiction for her short fiction collection, IN TIME OF NEED. Her first children's book, JOSEPHINE AGAINST THE SEA, received starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist, was a SLJ Best Book of 2021, A Black Caucus of the ALA Best Book of 2021 and an Ignyte Award Finalist for Best Middle Grade Novel.

She was also the co-editor of YA non-fiction anthology, ALLIES: Real Talk About Growing Up, Screwing Up and Trying Again (DK/PRH, 2021), which was a World Book Day Selection in the UK. Her upcoming middle grade horror, NIGHTMARE ISLAND, a tale based on Caribbean folklore, will be published by Scholastic in June 2023.

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 Bahamian writer whose narratives explore the intricacies of small-island life, drawing heavily from local folktales and mythology. Her writing has been featured in literary journals including Womanspeak, Granta, Windrush, Adda, and in forthcoming issues of The Caribbean Writer. She won the Commonwealth Short Story Regional Award for the Caribbean in 2019, shortlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and in 2022, she received the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival’s Elizabeth Nunez for Writer’s in the Caribbean. She is currently working on her first novel.

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 Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Global Tales, Girls Night In, and To Exist is to Resist.

Reading: Chapter 11, pages 148 - 150 (Miss Vera)
Background music by guitarist Djavi D.

Reading Chapter 3, pages 52 to 54 (Chris)
Background music by guitarist Djavi D.

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 multilayered investigation of institutional racism and the inherent exploitations of capitalism.

In essays that are uniquely straightforward and accessible, Garcia insists that in order to resist state-sanctioned violence against marginalized bodies and populations, we must understand our shared history of oppression—so that we can rise against it effectively and find new paths forward.

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant.