The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival has opened submissions for its 2025 Short Fiction Story Contest, inviting writers of Caribbean heritage across the region and the diaspora to submit original stories that serve as remedies for the times.
Framed under the theme Literary Botánica, this year’s festival envisions itself as a sanctuary of memory, resistance and reimagining. Organizers are seeking fiction that reflects healing, grounding and the enduring power of Caribbean storytelling, according to a press release.
The judges for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean will be Alscess Lewis-Brown (U.S. Virgin Islands), a cultural worker and advocate for the oral tradition; Kellie Magnus (Jamaica), a vibrant voice in children’s and cultural literature; and Annie Paul (Jamaica), a sharp critic and essayist whose pen unearths and reframes the Caribbean intellectual tradition.
Meanwhile, the judges for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize include Kei Miller (Jamaica), a poet, novelist and essayist whose work explores the tension between place and imagination; Jacob Ross (Grenada), a master of the mystery and the human psyche; and Patricia Powell (Jamaica), a literary alchemist, whose fiction lilts between pain, queerness, migration and memory.
The contest encourages stories that explore migration and return, quiet acts of rebellion, ancestral knowledge passed through generations, grief transformed into growth or the reclamation of suppressed memory through stories that reflect survival, resilience, and the Caribbean tradition of imagining and remembering in the face of rupture.
Click here to find out more about the eligibility criteria. The deadline is July 1.
