The third annual Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival is calling all writers of fiction in the North American Diaspora and the Caribbean to submit their original fiction stories for their 2021 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest. Up for grabs is the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize and BLCF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean. This year’s call requests stories that resonate with the festival’s theme, A Tapestry of Words and Worlds; a theme that explores and reveres the connections, ties and bonds between the Caribbean ancestral lands and the diaspora communities they have birthed.

Given the upheaval and interrogation wrought by the pandemic and the commensurate return to ancestral wisdoms and ideologies to manage the tremors, the festival is asking writers to possibly imagine a new future in which we have a greater control of our outcomes. What brave new worlds live on the frontier of the Caribbean writer’s imagination? What stories would we tell if we could speak with the tongues of ancient; what kind of world would we inhabit?

The BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean American Writers’ Prize and BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean invite submissions that speak to issues of land, justice, ancestral knowledge, belonging, ownership and oral histories; stories of pain, joy, grief, hope, return to memory; stories that critique and challenge the creative imagination to re-envision the world in the diaspora and the Caribbean.

For the 2021 BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest submission guidelines and entry form please go to: www.bklyncbeanlitfest.com/writing-contest