The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) team is calling for applications to the 2025 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest, “an annual writing competition geared towards unearthing and encouraging the distinctive voices and story of Caribbean-descended writers and expanding the creative writing landscape of Caribbean literature.” This year’s theme is “Roots and Remedies: Prescriptions for an Uncertain World.” Stories must be 3000 words or less. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2025 (11:59pm, EST).
The BCLF awards two prizes in the name of multiple-award winning writer, Dr. Elizabeth Nunez:
- BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize: All entrants must be of Caribbean heritage/of Caribbean descent and be a resident of the United States/Canada.
- BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean: Exclusively open to unpublished and published writers who were born/raised and holding nationality in the Caribbean.
Description (BCLF) — “Roots and Remedies: Prescriptions for an Uncertain World”
In a year when our festival becomes a Literary Botánica—a sanctuary of memory, resistance, and reimagining—we invite writers across the Caribbean and its diasporas to submit stories that act as remedies for the times we live in.
Roots anchor. Remedies mend. Stories do both.
This year’s BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest seeks new fiction that speaks to the urgent need for grounding and healing. Whether it is a tale of migration and return, an act of quiet rebellion, an ancestral recipe passed through generations, a rewilding of grief, or the reclaiming of forbidden memory, we are calling for stories that prescribe survival, illuminate resilience, and offer prayers for what endures.
Caribbean people daily prove that joy is an act of resistance, and that our stories through the ages are the cure, a living proof that even in the midst of rupture, we continue to imagine, to love, and to remember.
Each story becomes another stone placed carefully in the house our ancestors began—A house of Caribbean memory, song, and survival that no hand can tear down.
We encourage you to imagine your story as a prayer, an offering, a tonic, a gift to a world longing for repair and renewal.
Once, every leaf and root held a cure.
Once, every story was an offering to the future.
What story will you leave at the altar of our times?
Submit your prayer, your offering, your story to the BCLF 2025 Short Fiction Contest!
Let it take root.
Let it become a remedy.
For more information, see https://commonwealthfoundation.com/opportunity/brooklyn-caribbean-literary-festival-short-fiction-story-competition/
The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) team is calling for applications to the 2025 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest, “an annual writing competition geared towards unearthing and encouraging the distinctive voices and story of Caribbean-descended writers and expanding the creative writing landscape of Caribbean literature.” This year’s theme is “Roots and Remedies: Prescriptions for an Uncertain World.”
