Yvika Pierre and Alexia Tolas were announced winners of the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival’s Elizabeth Nunez Awards 2022 on September 3, 2022.
The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) is a celebration of culture as expressed through the pen of the storyteller and the voice of the poet founded in 2019. It is designed to facilitate vibrant conversations about Caribbean identity via a series of readings of classic and contemporary stories, podcasts, and conversations.
One of the festival’s most popular features is the writing competitions geared towards unearthing and encouraging the distinctive voice and story of the Caribbean-descended writer and expanding the creative writing landscape of Caribbean literature. The two are the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize and BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean. Patrice Grell Yursik and Akhim Alexis won the awards in 2021.
The longlists for the prize were announced on Friday, July 29 and Saturday, July 30 before the shortlists were revealed on August 16, 2022. The finalists were made public on the competition’s Instagram page on Sunday, August 21 before the winners were announced at the beginning of the festival. They are;
BCLF Short Fiction Story Contest 2022
Judges: Ayesha Gibson-Gill and Tanya Savage-Batson.
- Alexia Tolas, The Fix (Bahamas)
BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize
Judges: D. Ulysse (Haiti) and Ifeona Fulani (Jamaica)
- Yvika Pierre, Nadege goes Home (Haiti)
Alexia Tolas tweeted, “It’s a winner! I’m so excited and thankful to the organizers and judges @bklyncbeanlit 🥰. Knowing that someone laughed, their gut pinched, and their arm hair stood up makes it worth the while. I can’t wait to share this story of love, obsession, and cuckoo soup with you all 😊”
