The third annual Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival is pleased to announce the 2021 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers' Prize and BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean with a call for stories that resonate with this year’s festival theme, A Tapestry of Words and Worlds, a theme that explores and reveres the connections, ties and bonds between the Caribbean ancestral lands and the diaspora communities they have birthed.

Description

It is impossible to understand the Caribbean imagination without first understanding the environment of its creative. The magnitude of colonial conquest rendered the territory’s landscape as either paradise or terra nullius. The swift march of colonial acquisition dispossessed indigenous peoples from their lands, degraded ancient economic systems and dealt a forceful blow to native spiritual practices. Tribal boundaries were erased and new lines drawn. The new world underwent a transformation wherein the sacred was commodified; an action which later shaped the route that the region’s future would take.

In this violent tragedy of ownership, conquest and lust, indigenous voices were silenced and ancient wisdoms lost. Until now. We are witnessing a swift restoration and reclamation of the hidden, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrivaled crisis of the modern-day world. The talismanic properties of healing stories have become the succour through this wildly unpredictable and turbulent time. Buried ideologies rooted in the once marginalised indigenous nations and peoples are being unearthed and appraised. Dignities are being restored. Most of all, the world is taking notice of the power of the humanities to save. 

What does this mean? Can we imagine a new future in which we have a greater control of our outcomes? What brave new worlds live on the frontier of the Caribbean writer's imagination? What stories would we tell if we could speak with the tongues of ancient; what kind of world would we inhabit?

The BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean American Writers’ Prize and BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean invited submissions that speak to issues of land, justice, ancestral knowledge, belonging, ownership and oral histories; stories of pain, joy, grief, hope, return to memory; stories that critique and challenge the creative imagination to re-envision the world in the diaspora and the Caribbean.

Our small judging panel is dedicated to supporting the festival's goal "to provide a stimulating experience wherein upcoming writers of Caribbean descent are encouraged and empowered to tell their stories”.