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HEAT, HONEY SMOKE - A Sexual Impressionism Workshop ticket
Led by Celeste Mohammed (award-winning writer: Pleasantview | Ever Since We Small) Date: Monday Aug 18th, 2025 Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm Duration: 120 mins Venue: Online via Zoom Cost: $125 Here, in the intimate tradition of the botánica, where candles cast passionate shadows and smoke coils from brass bowls, this generative workshop invites writers to regard the literary sex scene as something more than performance. Wielding pen as brush, we apply the techniques of the art world to capture impressions of sensuality that feel emotionally true and spiritually resonant. Here, sensuality is not a spectacle, but a residue, felt in breath, in pause, in what’s left unsaid. Writers will experiment with language that conjures rather than declares, gesture over anatomy, feeling over form. Together, we’ll write toward the charged space between the lines–toward the heat, the honey, the smoke. Come, write with us, and encounter the illusion of explicitness.
Led by Celeste Mohammed (award-winning writer: Pleasantview | Ever Since We Small) Date: Monday Aug 18th, 2025 Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm Duration: 120 mins Venue: Online via Zoom Cost: $125 Here, in the intimate tradition of the botánica, where candles cast passionate shadows and smoke coils from brass bowls, this generative workshop invites writers to regard the literary sex scene as something more than performance. Wielding pen as brush, we apply the techniques of the art world to capture impressions of sensuality that feel emotionally true and spiritually resonant. Here, sensuality is not a spectacle, but a residue, felt in breath, in pause, in what’s left unsaid. Writers will experiment with language that conjures rather than declares, gesture over anatomy, feeling over form. Together, we’ll write toward the charged space between the lines–toward the heat, the honey, the smoke. Come, write with us, and encounter the illusion of explicitness.
$125.00+ Sales tax + $6.60 feeHOW TO BE UNMOTHERED: Readings to Launch ticket
Featuring Camille U. Adams in conversation with Niama Safia Sandy Date: Wednesday Aug 20th, 2025 Time: 7:30pm - 8:30pm Venue: Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented in partnership with Greenlight Bookstores | Made possible by a BAC Support Local Arts Grant | In How to Be Unmothered, writer and cultural worker Camille U. Adams crafts a memoir-in-essays that traverses loss, migration, and the delicate work of self-remaking. It is a narrative of what it means to live without a mother figure, and how the act of unmothering – whether by death, estrangement, or silence – can become both wound and womb. Told with searing honesty and lyrical precision, Adams’s debut is a meditation on grief, lineage, and the rituals we create in the absence of the ones we longed for. This event continues the BCLF’s deep and ongoing excavation of Caribbean motherhood – a theme we have returned to in years past through poetry, fiction, and conversation. How to Be Unmothered furthers that exploration with grace, bravery, and emotional clarity. In conversation with multidisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural strategist Niama Safia Sandy, Adams will reflect on the making of the book, the ancestral silences it confronts, and what it means to mother oneself into becoming. This gathering, ahead of the full bloom of the 2025 festival, is not only a celebration of a new work, but also a kind of vigil. An intimate communion with the stories that root and remake us. This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Featuring Camille U. Adams in conversation with Niama Safia Sandy Date: Wednesday Aug 20th, 2025 Time: 7:30pm - 8:30pm Venue: Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented in partnership with Greenlight Bookstores | Made possible by a BAC Support Local Arts Grant | In How to Be Unmothered, writer and cultural worker Camille U. Adams crafts a memoir-in-essays that traverses loss, migration, and the delicate work of self-remaking. It is a narrative of what it means to live without a mother figure, and how the act of unmothering – whether by death, estrangement, or silence – can become both wound and womb. Told with searing honesty and lyrical precision, Adams’s debut is a meditation on grief, lineage, and the rituals we create in the absence of the ones we longed for. This event continues the BCLF’s deep and ongoing excavation of Caribbean motherhood – a theme we have returned to in years past through poetry, fiction, and conversation. How to Be Unmothered furthers that exploration with grace, bravery, and emotional clarity. In conversation with multidisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural strategist Niama Safia Sandy, Adams will reflect on the making of the book, the ancestral silences it confronts, and what it means to mother oneself into becoming. This gathering, ahead of the full bloom of the 2025 festival, is not only a celebration of a new work, but also a kind of vigil. An intimate communion with the stories that root and remake us. This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
FreeWHAT WE SING WHEN WE ARE FAR FROM HOME: Transnational Identities, Sound and the Sacred ticket
Guest Authors: Rawlston Charles (TT), Erphaan Alves (TT), Danielle Brown Ph.D (TT) Date: Friday Sept 5th, 2025 Time: 5:00pm Venue: Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), 10 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn NY 11217 The Caribbean imagination is punctuated by rhythm and enveloped with sound. The entire Caribbean experience from birth is a sonic continuum; the bellies of her people swell with the sweet noises that have birthed the most important musical revolutions in modern history. From reggae, zouk and kompa to calypso, bachata and punta, sound – music and the upswing of accents from across the region – continues to be one of its people's most enduring archives. In this inter-generational conversation, legendary music producer Rawlston Charles, soca artist and cultural innovator Erphaan Alves, and ethnomusicologist Dr. Danielle Brown explore how music acts as both a sacred inheritance and a site of reinvention for diasporic Caribbean identities. A Trinidad & Tobago immigrant and longtime Brooklyn resident, Rawlston Charles is a pivotal figure in the international rise of calypso and soca. Through his record shop Charlie’s Calypso City, his label Charlie’s Records, and his Brooklyn-based recording studio, also foundational to hip-hop’s earliest recordings, Charles helped shape the soundtracks of multiple diasporas. Charlie’s Records distributed Caribbean music around the globe, and Charles himself produced genre-defining hits like Calypso Rose’s barrier-breaking Tempo, Superblue’s sacred/secular blend Soca Baptist, and Explainer’s Lorraine, which made its way into the UK Top 40. Erphaan Alves, known for his unique, melodic, husky-toned voice and electrifying stage presence, has steadily carved out a place in the canon of modern soca. A University of the West Indies graduate with a B.Sc. in Musical Arts, Alves was awarded Best New Male Soca Artiste at the International Soca Awards and named MTV IGGY Artist of the Week in the same breakout year. He made his debut appearance in the finals of the Trinidad & Tobago National Calypso Monarch in 2019 and has written for major soca acts like Kes the Band and Machel Montano. In addition to collaborating with top regional and international producers, he is a dedicated philanthropist and youth advocate, bringing the spirit of the Caribbean not just to the stage, but into community spaces across the diaspora. From Charles’ visionary impact to Alves’ genre-bending compositions that channel tradition through the aesthetics of now, this conversation will examine the body as instrument, the studio as altar, and the stage as portal. Hosted by Danielle Brown, this event takes up the role of music in shaping cultural memory, spiritual practice, and political expression across generations and geographies. What does it mean to carry the beat of an island into unfamiliar lands? What does it mean to sing the sacred in a strange place? What does it mean to carry the beat of an island into the world? What does it mean to listen back? What We Sing When We Are Far From Home is an offering for those who understand that in the Caribbean, even in displacement, the divine still arrives on a riddim.
Guest Authors: Rawlston Charles (TT), Erphaan Alves (TT), Danielle Brown Ph.D (TT) Date: Friday Sept 5th, 2025 Time: 5:00pm Venue: Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), 10 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn NY 11217 The Caribbean imagination is punctuated by rhythm and enveloped with sound. The entire Caribbean experience from birth is a sonic continuum; the bellies of her people swell with the sweet noises that have birthed the most important musical revolutions in modern history. From reggae, zouk and kompa to calypso, bachata and punta, sound – music and the upswing of accents from across the region – continues to be one of its people's most enduring archives. In this inter-generational conversation, legendary music producer Rawlston Charles, soca artist and cultural innovator Erphaan Alves, and ethnomusicologist Dr. Danielle Brown explore how music acts as both a sacred inheritance and a site of reinvention for diasporic Caribbean identities. A Trinidad & Tobago immigrant and longtime Brooklyn resident, Rawlston Charles is a pivotal figure in the international rise of calypso and soca. Through his record shop Charlie’s Calypso City, his label Charlie’s Records, and his Brooklyn-based recording studio, also foundational to hip-hop’s earliest recordings, Charles helped shape the soundtracks of multiple diasporas. Charlie’s Records distributed Caribbean music around the globe, and Charles himself produced genre-defining hits like Calypso Rose’s barrier-breaking Tempo, Superblue’s sacred/secular blend Soca Baptist, and Explainer’s Lorraine, which made its way into the UK Top 40. Erphaan Alves, known for his unique, melodic, husky-toned voice and electrifying stage presence, has steadily carved out a place in the canon of modern soca. A University of the West Indies graduate with a B.Sc. in Musical Arts, Alves was awarded Best New Male Soca Artiste at the International Soca Awards and named MTV IGGY Artist of the Week in the same breakout year. He made his debut appearance in the finals of the Trinidad & Tobago National Calypso Monarch in 2019 and has written for major soca acts like Kes the Band and Machel Montano. In addition to collaborating with top regional and international producers, he is a dedicated philanthropist and youth advocate, bringing the spirit of the Caribbean not just to the stage, but into community spaces across the diaspora. From Charles’ visionary impact to Alves’ genre-bending compositions that channel tradition through the aesthetics of now, this conversation will examine the body as instrument, the studio as altar, and the stage as portal. Hosted by Danielle Brown, this event takes up the role of music in shaping cultural memory, spiritual practice, and political expression across generations and geographies. What does it mean to carry the beat of an island into unfamiliar lands? What does it mean to sing the sacred in a strange place? What does it mean to carry the beat of an island into the world? What does it mean to listen back? What We Sing When We Are Far From Home is an offering for those who understand that in the Caribbean, even in displacement, the divine still arrives on a riddim.
FreeTHE GRAND PALOMA RESORT ticket
Cleyvis Natera in conversation with Lauren Francis-Sharma Date: Saturday Sept 6th, 2025 Time: 1pm - 2pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Event Type: One on one conversation, readings Cleyvis Natera returns to BCLF with the much-anticipated launch of her latest novel Grand Paloma Resort, a riveting exploration of power, memory, and the cost of paradise. Set in a luxury Dominican resort haunted by exploitation, secrets, and political unrest, the novel interrogates what it means to escape, who gets to heal, and what remains buried beneath manicured grounds and polished facades. In a special full-circle moment, Lauren Francis-Sharma, who was interviewed by Natera in February for her own BCLF-sponsored book launch for Casualties of Truth, will moderate the conversation. Both authors are also past judges of the BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest and continue to shape the literary landscape with their sharp insight and luminous prose. This timely discussion peels back the glossy veneer of tourist economies to reveal the tangled roots of colonial legacy, economic precarity, and the ache of personal betrayal. Yet Grand Paloma Resort pulses with moments of tenderness, intimacy, and resistance. It is a book that asks: what does restoration look like when the soil itself remembers violence? What does justice look like in the sunlit shadow of empire? Anchored in this year’s Root and Remedy theme, the event considers storytelling as excavation and reclamation. Natera's narrative becomes both balm and blade, offering critique, insight, and the possibility of healing through story. Join us for an unforgettable conversation with one of the most vital voices of contemporary Caribbean-American literature.
Cleyvis Natera in conversation with Lauren Francis-Sharma Date: Saturday Sept 6th, 2025 Time: 1pm - 2pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Event Type: One on one conversation, readings Cleyvis Natera returns to BCLF with the much-anticipated launch of her latest novel Grand Paloma Resort, a riveting exploration of power, memory, and the cost of paradise. Set in a luxury Dominican resort haunted by exploitation, secrets, and political unrest, the novel interrogates what it means to escape, who gets to heal, and what remains buried beneath manicured grounds and polished facades. In a special full-circle moment, Lauren Francis-Sharma, who was interviewed by Natera in February for her own BCLF-sponsored book launch for Casualties of Truth, will moderate the conversation. Both authors are also past judges of the BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest and continue to shape the literary landscape with their sharp insight and luminous prose. This timely discussion peels back the glossy veneer of tourist economies to reveal the tangled roots of colonial legacy, economic precarity, and the ache of personal betrayal. Yet Grand Paloma Resort pulses with moments of tenderness, intimacy, and resistance. It is a book that asks: what does restoration look like when the soil itself remembers violence? What does justice look like in the sunlit shadow of empire? Anchored in this year’s Root and Remedy theme, the event considers storytelling as excavation and reclamation. Natera's narrative becomes both balm and blade, offering critique, insight, and the possibility of healing through story. Join us for an unforgettable conversation with one of the most vital voices of contemporary Caribbean-American literature.
FreeTHE ISLAND ISN’T SILENT: Sound, Survival, and the Sacred - A Literary Botánica Conversation ticket
Date: Saturday Sept 6th, 2025 Time: 3:00pm - 4:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented in collaboration with Furious Flower Poetry Center In a world fraying at its edges – through displacement, climate threat, and spiritual fatigue – what remains sacred? What sounds, what languages, what ancestral echoes do we still carry? The Island Isn’t Silent brings together three powerful Caribbean voices, Jason Allen-Paisant, Kei Miller, and Lauren K. Alleyne, to reflect on poetry’s ability to map survival, re-enchantment, and belonging in uncertain times. Through readings and conversation, the writers delve into the landscapes – literal and metaphorical – that have shaped their work: the shifting geographies of migration, the music of memory, and the language of spiritual and political inheritance. Anchored by this year’s Literary Botánica theme, the event draws on the idea of poetry (and prose) as both remedy and ritual, offering not only witness to grief and upheaval but also pathways to resilience. At the heart of the conversation is hope, not as abstraction, but as a living, grounded force. Jason Allen-Paisant’s new work of literary nonfiction, The Possibility of Tenderness, infuses the natural world with a language of care, inviting us to reimagine softness as a form of power. This theme of quiet strength and healing threads through the work of each panelist, challenging the assumption that survival must be hard-edged. Together, they consider how the Caribbean imagination continues to offer what the world most needs: a vocabulary of rootedness, a cadence of care, and the sacred sound of possibility. This conversation is a garden of listening. A ceremony of sound. And a reminder: the island has never been silent – it has only waited for us to hear.
Date: Saturday Sept 6th, 2025 Time: 3:00pm - 4:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented in collaboration with Furious Flower Poetry Center In a world fraying at its edges – through displacement, climate threat, and spiritual fatigue – what remains sacred? What sounds, what languages, what ancestral echoes do we still carry? The Island Isn’t Silent brings together three powerful Caribbean voices, Jason Allen-Paisant, Kei Miller, and Lauren K. Alleyne, to reflect on poetry’s ability to map survival, re-enchantment, and belonging in uncertain times. Through readings and conversation, the writers delve into the landscapes – literal and metaphorical – that have shaped their work: the shifting geographies of migration, the music of memory, and the language of spiritual and political inheritance. Anchored by this year’s Literary Botánica theme, the event draws on the idea of poetry (and prose) as both remedy and ritual, offering not only witness to grief and upheaval but also pathways to resilience. At the heart of the conversation is hope, not as abstraction, but as a living, grounded force. Jason Allen-Paisant’s new work of literary nonfiction, The Possibility of Tenderness, infuses the natural world with a language of care, inviting us to reimagine softness as a form of power. This theme of quiet strength and healing threads through the work of each panelist, challenging the assumption that survival must be hard-edged. Together, they consider how the Caribbean imagination continues to offer what the world most needs: a vocabulary of rootedness, a cadence of care, and the sacred sound of possibility. This conversation is a garden of listening. A ceremony of sound. And a reminder: the island has never been silent – it has only waited for us to hear.
FreeLAUREATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - SIDE A ticket
This Grief is a Tonic: Poetry Between Motherhood and Music - A Conversation between Cheryl Boyce Taylor (TT) and Roberto Carlos Garcia (DR) Date: Saturday Sept 6th, 2025 Time: 5:30pm - 6:30pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Side A is the first half of a two-part poetic experience exploring the vast terrain of Caribbean identity and memory. This showcase gathers two acclaimed poets whose work charts a course through personal and collective reckonings. In this intimate and ceremonial session, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Trinidadian poet and mother of the late Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, and Roberto Carlos Garcia, Afro-Dominican poet, publisher, and elegist engage in a deep, lyrical conversation about motherhood, migration, music, and mourning. As son, father, black and first-generation American growing up in the 70s it was a time when Carlos Garcia’s consciousness was being shaped by hiphop which provided a respite and sanctuary for the dispossessed, unsure, othered and uncertain. Rooted in the Literary Botánica’s theme of Root & Remedy, this event is both reading and ritual - a moment to honor the power of poetry to hold what language alone cannot. From Caribbean folktale to hip hop lyric, this session becomes a healing altar built from memory and verse. It is also a powerful appreciation of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s poetry which itself is a masterful weaving of Trinidadian voice and American experience, capturing the cadence, spirit, and resilience of a diasporic self rooted in two worlds. Her use of Trinidadian creole is not just stylistic - it is an act of cultural preservation and pride, bringing the rhythms of her birthplace into the heart of the place she has adopted as home. In fleshing out the intricacies of Trinidad and the U.S., Cheryl’s work, a womb for memory, migration, and identity, offers readers a textured, multilingual understanding of what it means to belong everywhere and nowhere all at once. Through this dual lens, Boyce-Taylor reclaims space for Caribbean-American narratives with emotional depth and fierce tenderness. This conversation is the umbilical connection of Cheryl’s selves as mother and as woman. In many Caribbean traditions, grief is not meant to be hidden; it’s sung, danced, written, and witnessed. This session is a grief remedy, a sound bath, a soft protest against silence and forgetting. By placing two master poets in dialogue, we not only honor the lineage of storytelling, but invite the audience to plant their own elegies in the fertile soil of language.
This Grief is a Tonic: Poetry Between Motherhood and Music - A Conversation between Cheryl Boyce Taylor (TT) and Roberto Carlos Garcia (DR) Date: Saturday Sept 6th, 2025 Time: 5:30pm - 6:30pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Side A is the first half of a two-part poetic experience exploring the vast terrain of Caribbean identity and memory. This showcase gathers two acclaimed poets whose work charts a course through personal and collective reckonings. In this intimate and ceremonial session, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Trinidadian poet and mother of the late Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, and Roberto Carlos Garcia, Afro-Dominican poet, publisher, and elegist engage in a deep, lyrical conversation about motherhood, migration, music, and mourning. As son, father, black and first-generation American growing up in the 70s it was a time when Carlos Garcia’s consciousness was being shaped by hiphop which provided a respite and sanctuary for the dispossessed, unsure, othered and uncertain. Rooted in the Literary Botánica’s theme of Root & Remedy, this event is both reading and ritual - a moment to honor the power of poetry to hold what language alone cannot. From Caribbean folktale to hip hop lyric, this session becomes a healing altar built from memory and verse. It is also a powerful appreciation of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s poetry which itself is a masterful weaving of Trinidadian voice and American experience, capturing the cadence, spirit, and resilience of a diasporic self rooted in two worlds. Her use of Trinidadian creole is not just stylistic - it is an act of cultural preservation and pride, bringing the rhythms of her birthplace into the heart of the place she has adopted as home. In fleshing out the intricacies of Trinidad and the U.S., Cheryl’s work, a womb for memory, migration, and identity, offers readers a textured, multilingual understanding of what it means to belong everywhere and nowhere all at once. Through this dual lens, Boyce-Taylor reclaims space for Caribbean-American narratives with emotional depth and fierce tenderness. This conversation is the umbilical connection of Cheryl’s selves as mother and as woman. In many Caribbean traditions, grief is not meant to be hidden; it’s sung, danced, written, and witnessed. This session is a grief remedy, a sound bath, a soft protest against silence and forgetting. By placing two master poets in dialogue, we not only honor the lineage of storytelling, but invite the audience to plant their own elegies in the fertile soil of language.
FreeLAUREATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - SIDE B feat. Cooper Libre ticket
The Mouth of the Root: On Oral Tradition and Living Memory hosted by Derron Sandy Guest Poets: Derron Sandy (TT), Jason Allen-Paisant (JA), Rosamond S. King (TT), Kei Miller (JA), Ras Atiba (JA), Nadia Alexis (HT) Date: Saturday 6th Sept, 2025 Time: 7:30pm - 9:30pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented in partnership with TSZ Limited Side B - The Mouth of the Root is the rhythmic counterpart to Side A’s reflective register - a celebration of the Caribbean’s vibrant oral traditions, where the word is embodied, chanted, freestyled, and sung. This performance-based showcase brings together voices versed in extempo, dub, spoken word, and ancestral call. This showcase is rooted in the performance lineage of the region, where the poet is griot, voicebox, and rhythm keeper. Here, memory lives in sound. The mouth becomes vessel; and the word, when spoken aloud, becomes power. Featuring masterful performers who stretch the possibilities of voice and cadence, and curations pairing selections and poet by Afrodiasporic historian-Dj Cooper Libre, ‘The Mouth of the Root' is where poetry dances with music, protest, and play. It is a reminder that long before we wrote it down, we said it out loud. This is the oral tradition - alive, pulsing, and still making new memory from the old.
The Mouth of the Root: On Oral Tradition and Living Memory hosted by Derron Sandy Guest Poets: Derron Sandy (TT), Jason Allen-Paisant (JA), Rosamond S. King (TT), Kei Miller (JA), Ras Atiba (JA), Nadia Alexis (HT) Date: Saturday 6th Sept, 2025 Time: 7:30pm - 9:30pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented in partnership with TSZ Limited Side B - The Mouth of the Root is the rhythmic counterpart to Side A’s reflective register - a celebration of the Caribbean’s vibrant oral traditions, where the word is embodied, chanted, freestyled, and sung. This performance-based showcase brings together voices versed in extempo, dub, spoken word, and ancestral call. This showcase is rooted in the performance lineage of the region, where the poet is griot, voicebox, and rhythm keeper. Here, memory lives in sound. The mouth becomes vessel; and the word, when spoken aloud, becomes power. Featuring masterful performers who stretch the possibilities of voice and cadence, and curations pairing selections and poet by Afrodiasporic historian-Dj Cooper Libre, ‘The Mouth of the Root' is where poetry dances with music, protest, and play. It is a reminder that long before we wrote it down, we said it out loud. This is the oral tradition - alive, pulsing, and still making new memory from the old.
FreeGONE FOREIGN - Desire, Departure, and the Danger of Return ticket
Guest Authors: Nicole-Dennis Benn (JA), Ryan Bachoo (TT), Andie Davis (BD|AG|MS) hosted by Rosamond S. King (TT) Date: Sunday 7th Sept, 2025 Time: 1:00pm - 2:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Gone Foreign explores the enduring seduction of migration in the Caribbean imagination and the complex, often devastating truths that await on the other side. This event gathers writers whose work interrogates the myth of "foreign" as salvation, revealing the emotional, spiritual, and legal consequences of life in the diaspora. Through readings, testimony, and conversation, we ask: What is left behind in the pursuit of elsewhere? What happens when “foreign” rejects you? And how do we write through the trauma of forced return, statelessness, and cultural fragmentation? Guiding the conversation is Rosamond S. King, whose fearless poetics and scholarship explore displacement and the fractured geographies of Black diasporic life, bringing deep resonance to this urgent dialogue. This is a space for reckoning and remembrance. For stories of dreams deferred, borders breached, and the resilience of those who cross and return.
Guest Authors: Nicole-Dennis Benn (JA), Ryan Bachoo (TT), Andie Davis (BD|AG|MS) hosted by Rosamond S. King (TT) Date: Sunday 7th Sept, 2025 Time: 1:00pm - 2:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Gone Foreign explores the enduring seduction of migration in the Caribbean imagination and the complex, often devastating truths that await on the other side. This event gathers writers whose work interrogates the myth of "foreign" as salvation, revealing the emotional, spiritual, and legal consequences of life in the diaspora. Through readings, testimony, and conversation, we ask: What is left behind in the pursuit of elsewhere? What happens when “foreign” rejects you? And how do we write through the trauma of forced return, statelessness, and cultural fragmentation? Guiding the conversation is Rosamond S. King, whose fearless poetics and scholarship explore displacement and the fractured geographies of Black diasporic life, bringing deep resonance to this urgent dialogue. This is a space for reckoning and remembrance. For stories of dreams deferred, borders breached, and the resilience of those who cross and return.
FreeROOT, VOICE, MEMORY: On Plants, Mothers, and Making Ourselves Whole ticket
A modular gathering, part ritual, part reckoning. Guest Authors: Guest Authors: Donna Hemans (JA), Aleya Fraser (TT), Kaitlyn Greenidge (BD) hosted by Lauren Francis-Sharma(TT) Date: Sunday 7th Sept, 2025 Time: 3:00pm - 4:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 This event is for those learning to live, love, and heal while everything around them unravels. Bringing together a novelist, a herbalist, and a jazz musician, this session moves through memory, sound, and story as ways of holding what’s too complex to fix. Aleya Fraser, land steward, ethnobotanist and author of Caribbean Herbalism: Traditional Wisdom and Modern Herbal Healing, excavates ancestral plant knowledge as cultural memory and antidote to ecological despair. In her hands, plants become portals to embodied care and intergenerational healing. Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie, traces the fraught terrain between mothers and daughters, and the legacies women pass on, through blood, silence, and survival. In her novel, set in 19th-century Brooklyn and Haiti, a young Black woman comes of age in the shadow of a mother whose strength also casts silence. Through richly layered storytelling, Kaitlyn interrogates the emotional costs of inheritance and the radical act of forging one's own voice. Her work refuses tidy resolution and lives in the tension between grief and becoming. Vaughnette Bigford, acclaimed Caribbean jazz musician and digital griot, offers the living counterpoint. Her music and storytelling publicly chronicle the interior work of mothering, self-reclamation, vulnerability, and cycle-breaking, all in real time. She brings sound and spirit into the room, giving voice to the in-between states we’re rarely allowed to name out loud. Leading the conversation is Lauren Francis-Sharma (Casualties of Truth), a writer deeply attuned to the emotional and ancestral entanglements of womanhood, whose fiction tenderly navigates loss, longing, and the hard-won labor of becoming whole. Together, these artists refuse prescriptive narratives of healing. Instead, they name the ragged edges; the anxiety that precedes growth, the grief inside resilience, and the risk of loving anything in a collapsing world. Audience members will leave with questions and, we hope, a few living tools, not a prescription. What does it mean to return to yourself when the path has been buried? This session features music, brief readings, and a radical conversation that honors silence, uncertainty, and the sacredness of fracture. Attendees are invited not merely to listen, but to remember, reflect, and root themselves, however unevenly, in the possibility of becoming whole.
A modular gathering, part ritual, part reckoning. Guest Authors: Guest Authors: Donna Hemans (JA), Aleya Fraser (TT), Kaitlyn Greenidge (BD) hosted by Lauren Francis-Sharma(TT) Date: Sunday 7th Sept, 2025 Time: 3:00pm - 4:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 This event is for those learning to live, love, and heal while everything around them unravels. Bringing together a novelist, a herbalist, and a jazz musician, this session moves through memory, sound, and story as ways of holding what’s too complex to fix. Aleya Fraser, land steward, ethnobotanist and author of Caribbean Herbalism: Traditional Wisdom and Modern Herbal Healing, excavates ancestral plant knowledge as cultural memory and antidote to ecological despair. In her hands, plants become portals to embodied care and intergenerational healing. Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie, traces the fraught terrain between mothers and daughters, and the legacies women pass on, through blood, silence, and survival. In her novel, set in 19th-century Brooklyn and Haiti, a young Black woman comes of age in the shadow of a mother whose strength also casts silence. Through richly layered storytelling, Kaitlyn interrogates the emotional costs of inheritance and the radical act of forging one's own voice. Her work refuses tidy resolution and lives in the tension between grief and becoming. Vaughnette Bigford, acclaimed Caribbean jazz musician and digital griot, offers the living counterpoint. Her music and storytelling publicly chronicle the interior work of mothering, self-reclamation, vulnerability, and cycle-breaking, all in real time. She brings sound and spirit into the room, giving voice to the in-between states we’re rarely allowed to name out loud. Leading the conversation is Lauren Francis-Sharma (Casualties of Truth), a writer deeply attuned to the emotional and ancestral entanglements of womanhood, whose fiction tenderly navigates loss, longing, and the hard-won labor of becoming whole. Together, these artists refuse prescriptive narratives of healing. Instead, they name the ragged edges; the anxiety that precedes growth, the grief inside resilience, and the risk of loving anything in a collapsing world. Audience members will leave with questions and, we hope, a few living tools, not a prescription. What does it mean to return to yourself when the path has been buried? This session features music, brief readings, and a radical conversation that honors silence, uncertainty, and the sacredness of fracture. Attendees are invited not merely to listen, but to remember, reflect, and root themselves, however unevenly, in the possibility of becoming whole.
FreeTHE ALTAR OF MEMORY: A Sense of Arrival with Kevin Browne, Lauren K. Alleyne, and Malene Barnett ticket
Guest Authors: Kevin A. Browne (TT), Lauren K. Alleyne (TT), Malene Barnett (SVG|JA) Date: Sunday 7th Sept, 2025 Time: 5:00pm - 6:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 What does it mean to arrive… not just in place, but in self, in memory, in truth? In this luminous conversation, writer, professor and photographer Kevin Adonis Browne joins poet Lauren K. Alleyne and artist-writer Malene Barnett, to explore memory as method and tenderness as resistance. At the heart of the discussion is Browne’s A Sense of Arrival, a visual and lyrical meditation on Black interiority, Caribbean diasporic identity, and the enduring, sacred work of remembering. Barnett brings the textured power of Crafted Kinship, her artful reckoning with ancestral memory and the Black material traditions that survive displacement alongside Browne’s haunting imagery and lyrical essays. Together, they examine the cultural legacies carried through craft, ritual, and word. Guided by Alleyne’s lyrical insight, this conversation traverses longing, belonging, beauty, and the psychic dislocations of migration and colonial inheritance. This event is a conjuring - an altar built of image, language, and form - for those who wrestle with the weight of remembrance and the ache of becoming. Come for the witness, stay for the balm.
Guest Authors: Kevin A. Browne (TT), Lauren K. Alleyne (TT), Malene Barnett (SVG|JA) Date: Sunday 7th Sept, 2025 Time: 5:00pm - 6:15pm Venue: Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 What does it mean to arrive… not just in place, but in self, in memory, in truth? In this luminous conversation, writer, professor and photographer Kevin Adonis Browne joins poet Lauren K. Alleyne and artist-writer Malene Barnett, to explore memory as method and tenderness as resistance. At the heart of the discussion is Browne’s A Sense of Arrival, a visual and lyrical meditation on Black interiority, Caribbean diasporic identity, and the enduring, sacred work of remembering. Barnett brings the textured power of Crafted Kinship, her artful reckoning with ancestral memory and the Black material traditions that survive displacement alongside Browne’s haunting imagery and lyrical essays. Together, they examine the cultural legacies carried through craft, ritual, and word. Guided by Alleyne’s lyrical insight, this conversation traverses longing, belonging, beauty, and the psychic dislocations of migration and colonial inheritance. This event is a conjuring - an altar built of image, language, and form - for those who wrestle with the weight of remembrance and the ache of becoming. Come for the witness, stay for the balm.
FreeTIL LATER: A FAREWELL TOAST & STORY CELEBRATION ticket
Hosted by Derron Sandy & Tunes by DJ Cooper Libre Date: Sunday, September 7, 2025 Time: 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM Venue: The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Before we part ways, we gather one last time — not for goodbyes, but to hold a vibe with laughter, memory, and music! TIL LATER is BCLF’s closing ritual: a Caribbean-style lime meets literary toast, a celebration of all we’ve shared and all that’s still to come. Hosted by the vibrant Trinidadian poet and stage dynamo Derron Sandy, with selections from Cooper Libre on the set, this final hour brings together readers, writers, and guests for one last chance to gather. We’ll celebrate the voices that lit the way, the winners of the 7th Annual BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest, and the stories that held us — and we’ll send each other off the only way we know how: with rhythm, joy, and a promise to return. The program includes: – Reflections from the BCLF team – Award presentation/dramatized readings of the 2025 Short Fiction Story Contest winners – Spontaneous micro-readings or thank-you stories from the festival guest authors set to riddims – A communal “story toast” to send us forward – Final music set and farewell lime This is where the circle closes. Not with silence, but with music. Not with endings, but with roots. This isn’t goodbye. It’s just ‘til later.
Hosted by Derron Sandy & Tunes by DJ Cooper Libre Date: Sunday, September 7, 2025 Time: 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM Venue: The Center for Fiction, 15 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Before we part ways, we gather one last time — not for goodbyes, but to hold a vibe with laughter, memory, and music! TIL LATER is BCLF’s closing ritual: a Caribbean-style lime meets literary toast, a celebration of all we’ve shared and all that’s still to come. Hosted by the vibrant Trinidadian poet and stage dynamo Derron Sandy, with selections from Cooper Libre on the set, this final hour brings together readers, writers, and guests for one last chance to gather. We’ll celebrate the voices that lit the way, the winners of the 7th Annual BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest, and the stories that held us — and we’ll send each other off the only way we know how: with rhythm, joy, and a promise to return. The program includes: – Reflections from the BCLF team – Award presentation/dramatized readings of the 2025 Short Fiction Story Contest winners – Spontaneous micro-readings or thank-you stories from the festival guest authors set to riddims – A communal “story toast” to send us forward – Final music set and farewell lime This is where the circle closes. Not with silence, but with music. Not with endings, but with roots. This isn’t goodbye. It’s just ‘til later.
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Dear Friend, We write to you now, like never before, with a plea for financial support. Your contribution today would go a long way in providing the quality free programming you’ve come to expect from us. Through your support, you will power the programming that brings Caribbean writers and their important literary projects to the doorstep of Brooklyn.
Dear Friend, We write to you now, like never before, with a plea for financial support. Your contribution today would go a long way in providing the quality free programming you’ve come to expect from us. Through your support, you will power the programming that brings Caribbean writers and their important literary projects to the doorstep of Brooklyn.