The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) announced the first selection of guests attending the 2024 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival: Faces of the Caribbean.
Caribbean scholar and Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, professor Hilary Beckles will join Caribbean writing luminaries like Edwidge Danticat, Roxane Gay, Tiphanie Yanique, Dr. Dominic Kalipersad, P. Djèlí Clark, Richard Georges and Angie Cruz in Brooklyn from September 5 to 8, 2024.
For the past five years, the BCLF has brought together writers, artists, cultural workers, intellectuals, and activists from the Caribbean and its diaspora to the city, according to a news release.
This year, acclaimed Haitian-American writers Edwidge Danticat and Roxane Gay will launch Edwidge Danticat’s new collection of essays, We're Alone (Graywolf Press, 2024), while Trinidadian veteran journalist Dr. Dominic Kalipersad will share the stage with Dr. Kevin Browne, OCM Bocas Lit Prize winner.
US Virgin Islands-born writer Tiphanie Yanique joins the cast for the first time ever, and Locus Awards winner P. Djèlí Clark, makes a return to the festival. Richard Georges, first poet laureate of the British Virgin Islands, will also conduct a poetry workshop. Other noteworthy guests include decorated Dominican-American author, Angie Cruz and Lisa Allen-Agostini.
For the first time, the festival will extend its programming beyond its official dates, September 5 to 8, 2024, by organizing pre- and post-events in collaboration with other cultural organizations in Brooklyn and the Caribbean.
On August 8, BCLF will partner with Akashic Books to host a conversation at Greenlight Bookstore between Bill “Blade” Howell and Roland Watson-Grant to present Howell’s new book Pinnacle: The Lost Paradise of Rasta, a first-person origin story of Rastafari ideology, culture, and philosophy, capturing a crucial and little-known chapter in Jamaican history.
