Alexia Arthurs
Alexia Arthurs was born and raised in Jamaica and moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was twelve. A graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been published in Granta, The Sewanee Review, Small Axe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Shondaland, Buzzfeed, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017. How […]
Canisia Lubrin
Canisia Lubrin’s most recent book is The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, winner of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. Her previous books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Writer’s […]
Kendel Hippolyte
Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, playwright, director and sporadic researcher into Caribbean arts and culture. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies regionally and internationally. He has taught poetry workshops in various countries and performed at literary events within the Caribbean and beyond. His book, Fault Lines, won the OCM Bocas Prize for […]
Claire Adam
Her debut, multi prize-winning novel Golden Child (Faber & Faber) was published in 2019 and translated into several languages. It was a Times and Evening Standard ‘Book of the Year’, one of the BBC’s ‘100 novels that shaped our world’, featured on Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’, and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, the […]
Ivette Romero
Ivette Romero (PhD French Literature, Cornell University) is professor of Spanish at Marist College. Her interests include comparative Caribbean literature, gender and visual arts. Her published work includes journal articles, book chapters, and the co-edited volumes Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures […]
Gary Younge
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and columnist for The Guardian, based in London. He also writes a monthly column, Beneath the Radar, for the Nation magazine and is the Alfred Knobler Fellow for The Nation Institute. He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The […]
Schuyler Esprit
Schuyler Esprit has research and teaching experience in Caribbean literary and cultural studies, academic and professional writing, digital humanities, educational technology and higher education administration. She is the founder of Create Caribbean Research Institute, a non-profit educational institute based in Dominica that bridges academic excellence, technology empowerment and civic engagement to help young people build […]
Jane Bryce
Jane Bryce, Professor Emerita of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, is chair of fiction judges for the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She has published cultural and literary criticism in a range of academic journals and essay collections, specializing in African and Caribbean popular and […]
Nicole Sealey
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, USVI, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem; Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award […]
Geoffrey Philp
Geoffrey Philp has written two novels, Benjamin, My Son and Garvey’s Ghost; five poetry collections, Exodus and Other Poems, Florida Bound, Hurricane Center, Xango Music, and Dub Wise; two collections of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien and Who’s Your Daddy?, and three children’s books, Marcus and the Amazons, Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories, and The Christmas Dutch Pot Baby. His work is represented in nearly every anthology of Caribbean literature, and […]
Marina Warner
Writer of fiction, cultural history, and criticism Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, cultural history, and criticism. Her grandfather the cricketer Plum Warner was born and brought up in Port of Spain. Her novels include Indigo (1994) a revisioning of The Tempest, and The Leto Bundle (2000) a mythological sequence about a woman refugee. […]
Amanda T. McIntyre
Amanda T. McIntyre is a feminist writer, pan-Africanist, cultural activist and co-director of Caribbean feminist group WOMANTRA. Her most recently published work includes the short stories Rainy Season, and Petite Careme, published in Womanspeak; Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women.
Muli Amaye
Muli Amaye is the author of A House With No Angels (Crocus, 2019). Her short fiction is published in many anthologies and journals. She is the Coordinator of the MFA Creative Writing Programme at The University of The West Indies, Trinidad. She has taught creative writing in education and the community for over 20 years. […]
Nicholas Laughlin
Nicholas Laughlin is festival and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest and the former editor of Caribbean Beat and The Caribbean Review of Books. He has published two books of poems,The Strange Years of My Life (2015) and Enemy Luck (2019), and a book of genre-fluid “microtexts”, Bird Machine (2024). He is editor of […]
Ingrid Persaud
Ingrid Persaud’s novel Love After Love, set in Trinidad where she was born, won the 2020 Costa First Novel Award. Her new book is The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, published in 2024. She also won the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017. Her writing has […]
Celeste Mohammed
Celeste Mohammed is a Trinidadian lawyer-turned-writer. Her debut novel-in-stories Pleasantview (Jacaranda, 2021) won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize, and her debut non-fiction book A Different Energy: Women in Caribbean Oil was published in […]
Breanne McIvor
Breanne Mc Ivor was born and raised in Trinidad. She studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh before returning home. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Fish One-Page Prize and the Derek Walcott Writing Prize. In 2015, she won The Caribbean Writer’s David […]
Keith Jardim
Keith Jardim is from Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. His stories have appeared in many publications, and his book Near Open Water was published in 2011 by Peepal Tree Press.
Tamika Gibson
Tamika Gibson is the author of Dreams Beyond the Shore, winner of the 2016 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean YA Literature and one of Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books of 2017. Between growing up in Trinidad and Tobago and living in the United States, Tamika has always been observing the rich stories unfolding around her. She […]
Franka Philip
Franka Philip is a Trinidadian journalist and media consultant with 25 years experience in online, radio and print with specialist skills in digital media. She is the co-founder of the media company Trini Good Media.
Gabrielle Hosein
Gabrielle Hosein is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI, St. Augustine. She has been involved in Caribbean feminist movement building for two decades.
Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas is the author of the novels The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a U.K. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The […]
Deneka Thomas
Deneka Thomas (they/them) is a queer, non-binary writer, performance poet, arts educator and media practitioner from Trinidad and Tobago. Deneka is the founder and Creative Director of Bacano Leaf, a creative social enterprise that nurtures the Caribbean’s stories and culture by empowering young people to write and speak about their experiences, concerns, and their hope […]
Marina Salandy-Brown
Marina Salandy-Brown, Bocas Lit Fest founder and President, is a T&T Newsday columnist. Her writing has appeared in international journals and magazines and the New Daughters of Africa anthology (2019).
Anton Nimblett
Anton Nimblett, a Trinidadian who lives and writes in Brooklyn, is the author of the short story collections Sections of an Orange and Now/After. His fiction and poetry appear in several literary journals and in the anthologies Our Caribbean, War Diaries and The Peepal Tree Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories. Anton has presented work widely in the US […]
Maria Nunes
Maria Nunes is a Trinidad and Tobago photographer and producer who works in the field of cultural heritage, specializing in imagery of carnival-based traditions and the work of performing artists. Her book In a World of Their Own: Carnival Dreamers and Makers was published by Robert and Christopher Publishers in 2018.
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Professor of French literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. She has published scholarly articles and essays on Francophone Caribbean Literature and had co-edited several works including Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers; Methods in Caribbean Research: Literature, Discourse, Culture; Echoes of the Haitian […]
Anu Lakhan
Anu Lakhan is a writer and editorial triage consultant. She writes about books and food. She facilitated a writing course at UWI, St Augustine for eight years. Her books include Letters to K (Argotiers Press, 2018) and The Proper Care of Knives (Argotiers Press, 2025)
Attillah Springer
Attillah Springer is a Trinidad born writer and jouvayist. She writes on culture and memory and has presented papers and written commissioned work on traditional mas, social justice and African spirituality in England, Brazil, Nigeria and Haiti. She is a Director of Idakeda Group, a collective of women in her family creating cultural interventions for […]
Jacob Ross
Jacob Ross is the UK-based Grenadian author of the critically acclaimed works Tell No-One About This, Pynter Bender, Song for Simone, A Way to Catch the Dust. His crime fiction novel, The Bone Readers (Peepal Tree Press) won the inaugural Jhalak Prize in 2017. His latest book is Black Rain Falling (Hachette UK, 2020) was […]