Guest Authors: Geoffrey Philp + Iyaba Ibo Mandingo + Enzo Surin + Saida Agostini Bostic + Roberto Carlos Garcia

Conversation Partner: Tanya Batson-Savage + Attillah Springer

Music by: Cooper Libre

Laureates Of the Caribbean is a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, finger-snapping inducing gayelle where poetry is the bois. It is the festival's highest commendation to our storytellers who weave words in metaphor and feeling into stanza. Laureates is the lion who does not roar in pentameter; is how we make love with words, is how we fight when the weapons of our warfare are the one-drop and dubstep…is the peculiar kinda way we twist our pain into a passionate lyrical dance to a song that plays to the rhythm that beats in a Caribbean heart only.

As the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival’s only ode to the oral tradition of the Caribbean, this year at Festival 5 we are shaking the four corners of Caribbean civilisation to bring the best poets of our time to Brooklyn in a unique blend of verse, music, poetry and spoken word.