Root & Remedy - Prescriptions for an Uncertain World
September 5 - 7, 2025
This year, the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival became a literary botánica, a sacred space where story meets ritual and memory becomes medicine.
Set in Brooklyn, a living archive of Caribbean migration and imagination, Root & Remedy gathered writers, readers, and storytellers to share the remedies they carry: novels, poems, plays, and oral traditions that ground us in a time of upheaval.
In this season of exile and erasure, we gathered not just to read but to remember, not just to heal but to fight. These stories were the bush tea we boil, the prayers we whisper, the songs that remind us where we come from even as the ground shifts beneath us.
From personal heartbreak to collective grief, from exile to reinvention, this festival asked:
What stories heal us? What truths keep us rooted?
Thank you for joining in the Literary Botánica.
Here, every story was a cure. Every voice, a root.
Highlights from BCLF 2025
In this inter-generational conversation, legendary music producer Rawlston Charles, soca artist and cultural innovator, Erphaan Alves, and ethnomusicologist, Dr. Danielle Brown, explored how music acts as both a sacred inheritance and a site of reinvention for diasporic Caribbean identities.
View the conversation HERE via our Instagram.
Cleyvis Natera returned 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. 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, moderated the conversation. This timely discussion peeled back the glossy veneer of tourist economies to reveal the tangled roots of colonial legacy, economic precarity, and the ache of personal betrayal.
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 engaged in a deep, lyrical conversation about motherhood, migration, music, and mourning. As son, father, black and first-generation American growing up in the 70’s 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.
This event featured masterful performers that stretched 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 was the oral tradition - alive, pulsing, and still making new memory from the old.
Gone Foreign explored the enduring seduction of migration in the Caribbean imagination and the complex, often devastating truths that await on the other side. This event gathered writers whose work interrogates the myth of "foreign" as salvation, revealing the emotional, spiritual, and legal consequences of life in the diaspora.
The Island Isn’t Silent brought 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 dove 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.
This session featured brief readings, and a radical conversation that honors silence, uncertainty, and the sacredness of fracture. Leading the conversation is Lauren Francis-Sharma (Casualties of Truth), with Aleya Fraser, land steward, ethnobotanist and author of Caribbean Herbalism: Traditional Wisdom and Modern Herbal Healing and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie.
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 joined poet Lauren K. Alleyne and artist-writer Malene Barnett, to explore memory as method and tenderness as resistance. At the heart of the discussion was Browne’s A Sense of Arrival, a visual and lyrical meditation on Black interiority, Caribbean diasporic identity, and the enduring, sacred work of remembering.
Before we parted ways, we gathered 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 brought together readers, writers, and guests for one last chance to gather.
2025 Festival Sponsors
Programming Partners
Festival Partners
Festival Patrons
Mrs. Phoebe Blake, Mrs. Lauren Francis-Sharma, Mr. Shanon Fable