For five days this September, Brooklyn became a gathering place for writers, publishers and readers considering what it meant to imagine a Caribbean future.
The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival, now in its eighth year, returned Sept. 9-13 with a theme drawn from a familiar Caribbean proverb: “One Hand Don’t Clap.” This year’s festival, "One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future," asked what could be created through collective memory, cultural exchange and the stories carried across borders.
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.
The opening keynote, “Laureates of the Caribbean: Side A,” brought together Jamaican dancehall pioneer Sister Nancy and editor and publisher Tanya Batson-Savage. Their conversation touched on worldwide impact of Sister Nancy’s career and the circulation of Jamaican music, including the complicated questions of ownership and recognition that accompanied the genre's global influence.
Other programs turned toward the histories and experiences that shaped Caribbean communities across the region and its diaspora. The festival also examined how Caribbean identities were represented and circulated. “Virgin Islands Noir” brought publisher Johnny Temple in conversation with writers Hadiya Sewer and Traci O’Dea to discuss an anthology that challenged the familiar image of the Virgin Islands as an idyllic tourist destination.
"There is a repetition in colonialism that fundamentally shifts even our sense of how we understand what it means to be human," Sewer said. "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."
The festival’s annual Short Fiction Contest announced Amina Washington as the 2026 winner of the Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize and Zephrine Royer as the recipient of the 2026 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean.
The expansiveness and breadth of possibility is arguably the festival’s 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.
Caribbean communities have long helped define Brooklyn’s 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.
“One Hand Don’t Clap” was a reminder that stories endure through exchange across generations and through the people willing to carry them forward.
