One Hand Don’t Clap: Caribbean Worlds, Writing Towards the Future centers Caribbean and diasporic writers, artists, and thinkers whose work emerges from histories of rupture, migration, and collective survival. This aphorism, deeply known and understood by Caribbean people, heralds the power of collectivity, the building blocks of Caribbean societies, while it foregrounds the sheer might of cooperation and interdependence upon which we are sustained.

One Hand Don’t Clap will explore how storytelling is a shared act of world-making, that repairs memory, reimagines belonging, and insists on futures shaped through relation rather than isolation across islands, mainland territories, and global diasporas. In these shared acts of creation, Caribbean artists write forward, crafting futures grounded in hope, responsibility, reciprocity and possibility. Their work positions Caribbean storytelling as a collective force shaping our global moment. Rooted in intertwined histories of displacement and cultural invention, the festival illuminates writers and artists whose work transforms rupture into narrative power and shared vision. Through dialogue, performance, and literary exchange, Caribbean worlds emerge as generative sites from which new futures are being written rather than peripheral influences whose fates are decided for them.