BCLF Cocoa Pod Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival

Bio - Antiguan and Barbudan writer Joanne C. Hillhouse is a self-described #gyalfromOttosAntigua She is the founder and president of Wadadli Pen Inc. a non-profit committed to nurturing and showcasing the literary arts in Antigua and Barbuda. More at wadadlipen.wordpress.com. Joanne has authored several books of fiction including the novel Oh Gad!, novellas The Boy from Willow Bend and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, teen/young adult novel Musical Youth, and children's picture books With Grace, Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure, The Jungle Outside, and To be a Cheetah. Her fiction has also been published in anthologies like New Daughters of Africa and the abridged German anthology Neue Töchter Afrikas, and Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean; and journals like Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters and The Caribbean Writer, among others. She also publishes poetry and non-fiction as a freelance features writer, columnist (CREATIVE SPACE art and culture column), essayist, and content creator. Joanne is the 2023 Anthony N. Sabga Awards - Caribbean Excellence laureate. More on her and her services (as writer, editor, presenter) on jhohadli.wordpress.com 


Book synopsis - Books included in this reading are Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure (in which an Arctic seal stranded in the Caribbean sea tries to find his way home), With Grace (a Caribbean faerie tale with a mango tree faerie), The Jungle Outside (in which Tanti and Dante literally touch grass), and To be a Cheetah (a bedtime story in which a boy dreams of running like a cheetah fast like Usain Bolt across imagined African savannas).

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 gravity fields.

Serendipity and Ntenman are also students at the Lyceum, but unlike Rafi, they come from communities where such abilities are valued. Serendipity finds the Lyceum as much a prison as a school, and she yearns for a meaningful life beyond its gates. Ntenman, with his quick tongue, quicker mind, and a willingness to bend if not break the rules, has no problem fitting in. But he too has his reasons for wanting to escape.

Now the three friends are about to experience a moment of violent change as seething tensions between rival star-faring civilizations come to a head. For Serendipity, this change will challenge her ideas of community and self. For Ntenman, it will open new opportunities and new dangers. And for Rafi, given a chance to train with some of the best Wallrunners in the galaxy, it will lead to the discovery that there is more to Wallrunning than he ever suspected . . . and more to himself than he ever dreamed.
Barbadian writer Karen Lord is the award-winning author of Redemption in Indigo, The Best of All Possible Worlds, and The Galaxy Game, and the editor of the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean. Her latest book, The Blue, Beautiful World, will be published in August 2023.

Nightmare Island

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 productive way to channel her fears: creating a horror movie as scary as her nightmares.

When Peace suddenly becomes afraid of the dark and refuses to sleep alone, their parents take him away for "treatment" on Duppy Island. Serenity has a very bad feeling about the mysterious island and the facility's creepy leader, Dr. Whisper. And when she sees a silver butterfly from her nightmares in the forbidden forest she realizes that something is seriously, dangerously awry.

But nothing could've prepared Serenity for the truth: the island is home to douens -- faceless children with backward feet who are trapped in limbo between the world of the living and the land of the dead. And unless Serenity acts soon, her brother is going to join their ranks... 

Shakirah Bourne is a Bajan author and filmmaker. She once shot a movie scene in a cave with bats during an earthquake, but is too scared to watch horror movies. She is a recipient of the Governor General Award for Excellence in Literary Fiction for her short fiction collection, IN TIME OF NEED. Her first children's book, JOSEPHINE AGAINST THE SEA, received starred reviews in Kirkus and Booklist, was a SLJ Best Book of 2021, A Black Caucus of the ALA Best Book of 2021 and an Ignyte Award Finalist for Best Middle Grade Novel.

She was also the co-editor of YA non-fiction anthology, ALLIES: Real Talk About Growing Up, Screwing Up and Trying Again (DK/PRH, 2021), which was a World Book Day Selection in the UK. Her upcoming middle grade horror, NIGHTMARE ISLAND, a tale based on Caribbean folklore, will be published by Scholastic in June 2023.

Happy Caribbean-American Heritage Month to our listeners in the United States and Canada.

To those in the islands, Happy Read Caribbean Month celebrations!

Today’s Cocoa Pod episode is a promo swap with Always Lit, the BCLF interview-based series, that keeps the festival in yuh pocket always!

Enjoy today’s conversation between Miami-based Caribbean-American voiceover maverick, Vanessa James, and Trinidadian writer Breanne McIvor discussing her new novel, The God of Good Looks

Grief is like an inside joke: you have to have been there to really get it.
Everything Cassandra Rampersad knows about her family history has been overheard: whispered behind a closed door or written in a notebook stowed away. Cassandra has always been curious, and when a death in the family means she has to return home to Toronto, it seems like the perfect opportunity to finally discover what it is that no one else will talk about.
But uncovering the past will never be easy when it has stayed hidden for so long. And with every new revelation, Cassandra realises that there is a reason that her family has never been good at grieving…
A powerful meditation on memory and loss, Wild Fires is a beautifully crafted novel from a stunning new literary voice.
Sophie Jai’s debut novel WILD FIRES was the winner of the 2019 Borough Press x The Good Literary Agency Prize. The novel is shortlisted for 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was longlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. Jai has been a Writer-in-Residence & Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and an Artist-in-Residence at Sangam House in India. She is an alumna of the Humber School for Writers where she studied under Olive Senior. She is currently working on her second novel of short stories at the University of Oxford. 

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 having an affair with a married government official is a sure-fire way to ruin your prospects. So when Obadiah Cortland, a notoriously tyrannical entrepreneur in the island’s beauty scene, offers her a job, Bianca accepts, realizing that working on his magazine is the closest to her dreams she’ll get.

Sharp-witted and fiercely fun, The God of Good Looks alternates between Bianca’s diary entries and Obadiah’s first-person narrative to portray modern Trinidad’s rigid class barriers and the fraught impact of beauty commodification in a patriarchal society. Boisterous, moving, and full of meaty, universally relatable questions, Mc Ivor’s sparkling debut is an open-hearted, awakening tale about prejudice and pride, the masks we wear, and what we can become if we dare to take them off.

Breanne Mc Ivor is an award-winning writer with degrees in English from the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh and a certificate in Advanced Professional Makeup Artistry; she lives in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago.

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