A wind of change is blowing, and the NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s popular author interview series Bios & Bookmarks will explore the theme when the newest season opens on 17 March, 2022.
Titled “A Change is Gonna Come” — after US singer Sam Cooke’s 1964 classic, an unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement — the six-episode lead-up to the 2022 NGC Bocas Lit Fest will showcase recent books by Caribbean and diaspora authors. Through their works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, the writers invite audiences to explore ideas of change — from individual to collective, cultural to political — examining forces that impact on human relationships and experience, and are imperative to building a better world.
Bios & Bookmarks highlights the timely theme amid a pandemic that has reiterated change as a veritable constant in life, and as we observe sobering events play out on the world stage.
Episodes will air on consecutive Thursday evenings at 6 pm TT time, from 17 March to 21 April, via Facebook and YouTube. Each Bios & Bookmarks episode offers viewers the opportunity to hear writers read from and discuss their books, and interact with authors via questions and comments.
On 17 March, artist, writer, and scholar Andil Gosine, who ponders humanism and queer theory in understanding queer desire in the Caribbean in his 2021 offering Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean, will make for a thought-provoking guest.
Jamaican writer Monica Minott, whose latest book Zion Roses was longlisted for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize, will bring some poetry into the mix on 24 March, through pieces that explore the relationships among history, art, literature, and justice.
And when Puerto Rican writer Xavier Navarro Aquino is featured on 7 April, he will launch viewers into a riveting struggle for survival through his debut novel, Velorio, as six survivors encounter a stark reality in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Other authors lined up for this Bios & Bookmarks season include Jamaican Kei Miller and Trinidadian-Scottish Vahni Capildeo, both of them past winners of the prestigious Forward Prize for Poetry, and Trinidadian-American memoirist and activist Marlon Peterson.
Bios & Bookmarks was launched by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in April 2020, in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Six seasons have aired since then. Season seven offers a thematic preview of the upcoming 2022 NGC Bocas Lit Fest. The full festival programme will be launched later this month.