PREE - Caribbean. Writing.

PREE 15 is here!

Aug 10, 2026 | PREE News | 0 |

PREE 15 is a bumper issue with twice, if not thrice, as many submissions as we usually recieve. This is probably due to the offer of monetary prizes for the three most outstanding entries. This issue was also open to writers from the global South and several authors from other countries submitted work. We will note those shortlisted as we upload their work and announce the winners on August 31st! Enjoy PREE 15 themed Precarity, Fragility, Vulnerability. We are excited by the quality of the submissions we received. As usual we will be adding to the issue each week until the full issue is up. Enjoy and let us have your feedback!

Bodysurfing

Aug 14, 2026 | DOMINIQUE LYEW, Fiction, PREE 15 | 0 |

Joey popping up in Portland was kinda crazy. It was about three years ago that she met him at Trinidad carnival, her in her elaborate wings and he in his shirt from his friend’s brand. He was a fisherman by trade, and the dexterity of his fingers translated beyond tying line, she remembered that much.

On Becoming a Storm: Three Poems After Melissa

Aug 14, 2026 | Poetry, PREE 15, ROLANDO ALBERTS, SHORTLISTED | 0 |

Something else inside her
Spins in the other direction
She tears open the pulpit and
Places her hands against both columns
Rocks the sanctuary to each side
Pulls the roof down and covers
Serpents, sinners and saints alike
Before moving to another place
Where perhaps she will be forgiven
Where perhaps she will find a home

Festival of Lights

Aug 14, 2026 | Fiction, JUDY RAYMOND, PREE 15 | 0 |

She imagined the countless deyas conjuring others into life around the planet as it spun into darkness, wrapped in coils of these little beads of light. She thought of the first Indians brought here almost two hundred years ago, lighting their deyas — in those days not so different from the lamps their colonial masters used — under strange skies.

Ode to the John Crow; Directions to Maroon Cemetery

Aug 13, 2026 | Poetry, PREE 15, Topher Allen | 0 |

And when the only thing being raised from the dead is a stench,
we desire your help; we have opened a carrion-café,
offering you a buffet of our unburied. You who glide high and look low,
you who are not Gods but angels of the fetid flesh.

NOTHING MOVES IN STRAIGHT LINES

Aug 13, 2026 | CHIDERA UDOCHUKWU-NDUKA, Non Fiction, PREE 15, SHORTLISTED | 0 |

This is an essay about spirals and the shape migration takes when you look at it honestly. It is about how Haitian Spiralism taught me to read my own Nigerian displacement and about how you can study a philosophy that emerged from a context completely different from yours and still find yourself reflected in its waters, still hear your own heartbeat in its drums.

Brackish

Aug 12, 2026 | CHRISTIAN EMECHETA, Fiction, PREE 15, SHORTLISTED | 0 |

I would have loved other names, but my parents chose to name me Kael; Kael Prospere in full. I am writing this from a shipping container in Rotterdam, six thousand miles from the place I was born. The container has been converted into housing. They call it “transitional accommodation.”

Village League

Aug 12, 2026 | Fiction, PREE 15, SHASTRI SOOKDEO | 0 |

Sometimes when you meet up people from back in the day, it doesn’t have nothing you could talk to them about. People who gone and they whole life change so much, they doesn’t really have nothing in common with you again but the old days. And plenty people don’t like to talk about back in the day. I could understand that.

Voyage in Three Parts

Aug 12, 2026 | Poetry, PREE 15, YASMINA CABRERA | 0 |

This was when my mother’s hair hung low
Almost at her feet
Like a jet black train that announced her return
This was when my father cleaned out the closet
Tall mahogany doors
And found a poem written to her by a man we did not know

Through Babylon and Other Poems

Aug 12, 2026 | GEORGIO RUSSELL, Poetry, PREE 15, SHORTLISTED | 0 |

That year a violence made the ocean
surge and spoon the humans out the shallow
ground of a churchyard, the hurricane in question
spreading our dead among the miscellany,
banana leaves and zinc, a broken galore left
on the roads like crepe paper after parade.

The Education of Marlene Joseph

Aug 10, 2026 | Fiction, OLUWANIFEMI BAKARE, PREE 15, SHORTLISTED | 1 |

A typical day is the twenty-minute walk to school because the money she saves on transport is money she can put toward the chalk she buys herself because the ministry allocation ran out in October. A typical day is thirty-eight children in a room built for twenty-five, and the heat, and Widline in the front row who is ten and reads at a level that would embarrass children in Lyon, who reads with her whole body tilted toward the page as if leaning into a wind.

The Fisherman

Aug 10, 2026 | Fiction, PREE 15, SHEHRYAR SARWAR | 0 |

A news bulletin plays on the TV. Another action by the big navy that has been patrolling the waters of the Caribbean. Grainy black-and-white images, a boat in the water, crosshairs superimposed, a flash that suddenly lights up the screen.