Women writers rule on final day of Bocas 2024
“Our writers, at home in the Caribbean and scattered throughout the diaspora, provoke us with their questions, arguments, and hard-won insights. They compel us to think about who we are, where we came from, where we are going, our time and place, and our responsibilities to each other. At a time when the world is racked by conflict—from Haiti on our doorstep to Gaza halfway across the globe—and justice seems an ever-more elusive goal, our writers push us to active engagement. “For the past 14 years, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the largest literary gathering in the Anglophone Caribbean, has celebrated Caribbean writers’ imaginative and intellectual power, the energy and diversity of their voices and ideas, as they inspire and entertain us. Caribbean literature, emerging from a fraught and rich historical and social context, is global in scope, ambitions, and achievements, and the line-up of writers and books at this year’s festival proves that.”
- Nicholas Laughlin, Festival and Programme director, Bocas Lit Fest.
This Sunday is the fourth and final day of 2024 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, which has lit up Port-of- Spain with ideas, cracking conversations and sessions with a jam-packed literary extravaganza featuring over 150 specially invited authors and performers at NALIS, Port-of-Spain.
Festival and Programme director of Bocas Lit Fest, Nicholas Laughlin, shares some of his top events today featuring Caribbean women’s writing.
Christina Sharpe
Latest book: Ordinary Notes, Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York Magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and Noble, and the winner of the 2024 Windham-Campbell Prize. About Ordinary Notes from the publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): “A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skilfully weaves artefacts from the past— public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. About the writer: Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness, Being and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, and, most recently, Ordinary Notes, Winner of the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction. She is currently working on a monograph called Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2025). 2024 Adult’s Festival Participant, 2024 Featured Speaker.
Canisia Lubrin
New book: Code Noir. A past winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for The Dyzgraphxst. About the writer: Canisia Lubrin is a St. Luciaborn poet and winner writer, editor, teacher and critic. Frequently anthologised, her work has been translated into Spanish and Italian. Lubrin is also the author of the awards-nominated poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis. She teaches at the University of Toronto and will join Penguin Random House as an editor. About The Dyzgraphxst: This book won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. In March 2021, Lubrin was named a 2021 Windham Campbell Prize winner. From the Publisher (Penguin Random House, Canada): “Code Noir is a groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from one of Canada’s most exciting and admired writers. Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction is that rare work of art —a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees initially passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
Nicole Sealey
Latest book: The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. About the writer: Nicole Sealey was born in St Thomas, USVI, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry (2018 and 2021). She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris programme at New York University. From the Publisher: (Penguin Random House) In August 2014, Michael Brown—a young, unarmed Black man—was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and procedures that have become commonplace—from disproportionate arrest rates to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damning. Award-winning poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. Illuminating what it means to live in this frightening age and what it means to bear witness, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is an engrossing meditation on one of the most important texts of our time.
Myriam J. A. Chancy
About the writer: Myriam J. A. Chancy, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised there and in Canada, is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow who currently holds the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College, California. She is the author of four books of literary criticism and four novels. New book: Village Weavers; previous book, Harvesting Haiti (reflecting on Natural Disasters longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Bocas Lit Fest. From The Publisher: (The University of Texas Press) Harvesting Haiti, ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the postearthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate onthe-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Presented initially at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster.
Barbara Lalla
About the writer: Novelist Barbara Lalla is Professor Emerita, Language and Literature at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine. She is the author of five novels, including By Such a Parting Light, published in 2024. Her numerous scholarly works include Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse, Defining Jamaican Fiction: Matronage and the Discourse of Survival, and the co-authored Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole, Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and Caribbean Literary Discourse: Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean. New book: By Such a Parting Light. About Such a Parting Light by the Publisher (Bayshore Books LLC): “Disaster catapults three children into the care of their Caribbean grandparents before another relative, elusive and perhaps unstable, makes a conflicting claim to guardianship. Balancing domestic calamity against her own compulsive writing, Aria faces physical and psychological threats as a pandemic creeps up on the world and the country moves into lockdown. Such a Parting Light offers a humorous and poignant tale of ageing and coming of age, and it takes a mischievous approach to the multiple. Its realism blends seamlessly into strains of the marvellous and gothic - the novel’s themes of loss and separation, love and resilience, are universally appealing. The book personalises local and international violence and terror by bringing it all home to a small country in an international context of uncontained infection and catastrophic politics. Turning an astonished eye on developed nations from the frail shelter of a tiny island, the tale unveils alternative notions of civilisation and enlightenment.