Featured in this folio:
- Topher Allen
- Simone Leid
- Shannon Chen See
- Nastassia Rambarran
- Lauren Licona
- Laura Andrea
- Kay-Ann Henry
- Jonifah Richard
- Jannine Horsford
- Don Edward Walicek
- Courtney Conrad
- Cornel Bogle
- Chinyere Brown
- Chelsea Gentle
- Amanda T. McIntyre
Pan yard, scrap yard, church yard, hell yard. Tidy yards, dirt yards, ghetto yards, tenement yards, barrack yards, and grandmothers’ yards. The yard is the crucible through which we come to understand modern Caribbean geography and social life. From the iconic “government yard in Trenchtown” immortalised in Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” to the rural family plots passed down through generations, the yard serves as an anchor for memory, history, and the everyday poetics of survival and community. Its significance is rooted deeply in the post-plantation landscape, where descendants of Indigenous, African, and Asian peoples carved out autonomous modes of being. Whether situated on the urban periphery or within inherited family land, these enclosures are where personal histories are woven, futures are imagined, and the collective sensibilities of a people take shape.
In curating this collection, our aim was to amplify a generation of writers actively shaping the region’s contemporary literature. Limiting the submission call to writers who were born in or currently reside in the Caribbean was a deliberate, if delicate, decision – one met with immense grace and support from the editors at ANMLY. This boundary was never drawn to alienate the diaspora, nor to discount those who proudly carry Caribbean heritage without a national birth certificate. It was not intended as a form a literary passport control, but rather as an intentional response to a material urgency: the region’s sparse publishing infrastructure, the scarcity of local literary journals compared to metropolitan centres, and the acute lack of funded workshops, fellowships, and manuscript development programs for those living in the region.
This folio offers a calculated disruption of two enduring stereotypes. First, it fractures the tourist fantasy of the Caribbean as “paradise” populated by carefree islanders. Just as crucially, it troubles the flattening monolith of the “Caribbean writer,” a label that too often forces geography to stand in for artistic individuality. By foregrounding distinctive voices within the archipelago and its continental coastlines, we honour their individual creative imagination while staying grounded in a shared, contested terrain.
The work gathered in this folio reflects the layered realities of our enclosures: spaces haunted by proximity to systemic violence, heavy with the nostalgia of mothers and abuelas, charged with the friction of forbidden or sanctioned intimacies, and continually conscious of existing within the contested “backyard” of imperial powers. There is no unit of life here too small to scrutinise, nothing too common to elevate and praise. Like so many who came before us and those who labour alongside us today, we begin from the dirt of the yard to look outward at the world.
September 2026
amílcar peter sanatan
amílcar peter sanatan works between East Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and Helsinki, Finland. His multilingual creative writing, interviews, and reviews of books and art have appeared in literary anthologies, journals, and magazines. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: About Kingston (Peekash Press) and The Black Flâneur: Diary of Dizain Poems, Anthropology of Hurt (Ethel Zine & Micro Press).