BCLF Cocoa Pod

Tracing a lineage from Ragga Soca, Rapso, and Extempo to legendary carnival speech characters like the Pierrot Grenade, Baby Doll, and Midnight Robber, this podcast proves that spoken word is a cultural force and tradition in Trinidad and Tobago. Join amílcar peter sanatan as he wanders through the steelpan yards of East Port-of-Spain, the ache of tabanca  and bombastic badness in "Robber Tal...

Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins—resurrected from death and wiped of their memories—have only three unbreakable vows. First, the contract must be just. Second, even the most powerful assassin may...

Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, organizer, and change agent. Her essay “Red” weaves a meandering tale that touches on Sandy’s coming of age through rememberings of family lore, food, and key engagements with cultural organizing anchored through sorrel. The essay considers the ubiquitous staple Caribbean holiday drink as a microcosm of the collisions of poli...

Of all contest entries, Bush Bath is perhaps the embodiment of the 2025 festival contest theme, Remedies of Root. Penned by Brandon McIvor, it traces a man on a visit to Trinidad to see his dying mother, who abandoned him as a child. He delays the meeting, instead taking a symbolic "bush bath" in a forest pool to cleanse his pain. There, a recovered memory reveals his mother didn't...

Quality Time by Kodi-Anne Brown is the winner of the BCLF Short Story contest for 2025. Described by judge, Patricia Powell, as "...simple and quiet and unsettling and tender and wonderfully turned," it follows a girl on a rare visit with her father who endures his shallow, rehearsed affection. When she is left with a babysister to care for unexpectedly, something unplanned happens. Qual...

On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognisable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. Down below is the barrack, a ramshackle building of wood and tin, divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops - Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, who live hard lives of backbreaking work,...

On the verge of adulthood, Rafi attends the Lyceum, a school for the psionically gifted. Rafi possesses mental abilities that might benefit people . . . or control them. Some wish to help Rafi wield his powers responsibly; others see him as a threat to be contained. Rafi’s only freedom at the Lyceum is Wallrunning: a game of speed and agility played on vast vertical surfaces riddled with variable...

‘Please Take One’ follows Lloyd, an elderly resident of Chaguanas, as he embarks on a series of desperate attempts to capture the attention of an aloof supermarket clerk.  Portia Subran is a writer and artist from Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago.

Kai Muhammad is an avid BCLF reader who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Zo and the Forest of Secrets is one of his favorite middle grade level Caribbean books. He was overjoyed for the opportunity to ask Alake, the book’s writer, some of the many burning questions he had about the thrilling adventures of her characters  Listen now as Kai and Alake hold court to chop shop about the thrilling story and...

A mythic love story set in Trinidad, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's radiant debut is a masterwork of lush imagination and exuberant storytelling—a spellbinding and hopeful novel about inheritance, loss, and love's seismic power to heal. In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard...

Enjoy readings from The Chaos, Derron Sandy's poetry pamphlet, where his subjects are the individuals and communities who suffer most from injustice, poverty and violence in contemporary Trinidad. Using a variety of forms and approaches, the poems describe scene after painful scene – from the murder of an abusive boss and a killing at a gang member’s wake to a child’s suicide and the finding...

Twelve year-old Serenity Noah has never told anyone about her recurring nightmares -- the haunting images of silver butterflies whose flapping wings drive away all sound, leaving only suffocating silence in their wake. Her parents already favor her "perfect" younger brother, Peace, and she doesn't want to be seen as the "problem" child. Instead, Serenity's found a pro...

Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican writer based in France. Her first collection of short stories, Satellite City, and her novel Sweetheart have both won Commonwealth literary prizes. Sweetheart has been translated into French (Trésor) and was awarded the Prix Carbet des lycéens in 2017. Her most recent novel is A Million Aunties - longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. Her work has also appeare...

Winner 2022 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean  “The Fix” is a story of love, obsession, and obeah that follows a young woman as she seeks advice from an obeah practitioner. She has fallen in love with her neighbor, but rather than compete with his current lover directly, she looks to magic to steal him for herself. The obeah woman teachesthe young woman how to infuse her food...

In Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear...

"What you’re about to hear is the opening of my novel-in-progress, The Price of Two Pence. It begins in Battersea, January 1975, on the Number 77 bus, where Ronald Jones — a Jamaican bus conductor — asks two young men for a two-pence fare for their dog. What happens next alters his life, and the life of his sister Nancy, forever. The novel traces the aftermath of that moment across London and...

We at the BCLF are proud to mark the release of “Getting Through: New and Selected Poems” by Mervyn Taylor, an extraordinary collection which gathers decades of lyrical mastery into one definitive volume, with this special episode of Cocoa Pod. Described as “a treasure trove… capturing the beauty and nuances of ordinary and extraordinary lives,” this poetry collection is a profound offering of Car...

Ever Since We Small – A Reading by Celeste Mohammed In this episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod, award-winning writer Celeste Mohammed reads from her second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small. Spanning generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family, the book follows the Gopauls from Jayanti’s journey as a girmitiya to the struggles of her descendants in modern Trinidad. Along the journey of these ten intercon...

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant In Let Me Liberate You, a restless New York artist searching for purpose returns to Barbados and stumbles into the role of activist in this scathingly funny and brilliantly observed satire about privilege, family discord, and performative do-gooding. Let Me Liberate Yo...

THE GOD OF GOOD LOOKS SUMMARY Combining the honesty, warmth, and humour of Queenie and a modern-day Bridget Jones’s Diary, award-winning writer Breanne Mc Ivor’s entertaining, transportive, and luminous debut novel follows a young Trinidadian woman finding her voice and a new kind of happy ending. Bianca Bridge has always dreamt of becoming a writer. But Trinidadian society can be unforgiving, and...

After a personal tragedy upends his world, American-born artist Chris travels to his mother's homeland in the Caribbean hoping to find some peace and tranquility. He plans to spend his time painting in solitude and coming to terms with his recent loss and his fractured relationship with his father. Instead, he discovers a new extended and complicated "family." The people he meets he...