Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, organizer, and change agent.

Her essay “Red” weaves a meandering tale that touches on Sandy’s coming of age through rememberings of family lore, food, and key engagements with cultural organizing anchored through sorrel. The essay considers the ubiquitous staple Caribbean holiday drink as a microcosm of the collisions of political histories, desire and ancestral memory.

Sandy's work across disciplines delves into the human story - through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual. Her creative practice often is an examination of the ways history, economics, migration and other social forces and constructs have shaped modern realities. Her aim is to use the visual, written and performing arts to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them and to lift us all to a higher state of ontological and spiritual wholeness in the process. Sandy has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University and Pratt Institute.

Quality Time by Kodi-Anne Brown is the winner of the BCLF Short Story contest for 2025. Described by judge, Patricia Powell, as "...simple and quiet and unsettling and tender and wonderfully turned," it follows a girl on a rare visit with her father who endures his shallow, rehearsed affection. When she is left with a babysister to care for unexpectedly, something unplanned happens. Quality Time confronts the tension common in familiar relationships within the Caribbean familial ecosystem with dignified candor and the redemptive beauty of forgiveness. Despite the protagonist's well-placed resentment, new quiet bonds are formed which imbues the reader and the story's characters with a potential for renewal and hope.

Kodi-Anne Brown is a Jamaica-born writer, editor, and community specialist whose work is grounded in arts, culture, and community empowerment. With academic and professional interests spanning postcolonial futurity, decolonial ecology, and multiculturalism, Brown’s writing interrogates new ways of relating to the world and expressing the self. Fluent in both English and French, she continues to expand her practice through opportunities in communications, media, community engagement, and the literary arts.

Of all contest entries, Bush Bath is perhaps the embodiment of the 2025 festival contest theme, Remedies of Root. Penned by Brandon McIvor, it traces a man on a visit to Trinidad to see his dying mother, who abandoned him as a child. He delays the meeting, instead taking a symbolic "bush bath" in a forest pool to cleanse his pain. There, a recovered memory reveals his mother didn't save him from danger, but first let him go. As the story unfolds, McIvor's main character must decide whether to confront her with this painful truth or offer her peace.

Brandon Mc Ivor was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago and holds a BSc in English Literature from New York University. He currently teaches English in Ehime, Japan, while continuing to build a literary practice that explores the craft and circulation of storytelling. His work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and in Akashic Books’ flash fiction series, among other publications. He was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize in 2020 for his work Finger, Spinster, Serial Killer. Both writer and marketer, Mc Ivor is deeply interested in the forms and voices through which stories are told, seeking to move audiences through fiction, poetry, and creative communication alike.

‘Please Take One’ follows Lloyd, an elderly resident of Chaguanas, as he embarks on a series of desperate attempts to capture the attention of an aloof supermarket clerk.

Portia Subran is a writer and artist from Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago.