Elizabeth Best: Keeping a Poetic Connection to Home Through NIFCA 

According to Dr Elizabeth Best, poetry is not just an art form; it is a way of staying connected to Barbados, its people and the cultural rhythms that have shaped her life. Though she has spent more than two decades teaching in Louisville, Kentucky, the United States, the National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) remains an important link to home. 

Best’s journey with the National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) began while she was still a schoolgirl at The St Michael School. Initially participating in visual arts, she later gravitated towards literary arts, building on the creative foundation nurtured through the Barbados Writers Workshop, which she joined in 1972. 

Dr. Elizabeth Best

Her relationship with NIFCA has endured across decades and distance. In 2022, she received the festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award for Riffing about Surviving among the Bearded Fig Trees of Ichirouganaim. The collection was published online in 2023 and subsequently released in paperback in 2024.   The poems celebrate survival rather than surrender, using the bearded fig tree as a powerful symbol of endurance and belonging. In 2023, she earned third prize in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Contest for Shak-Shak – A Woman’s Tongue Percussion. She also earned a Gold award on her first attempt in NIFCA’s prose category with Mama’s Soup, for which she received the NIFCA Award for Citizenship in 2024, a story that went on to be shortlisted for the Brooklyn/Caribbean Short Story Competition. 

For Best, however, the value of NIFCA extends well beyond winning awards. Entering the festival each year gives her a creative deadline, keeps her work evolving and sustains a vital connection with the Barbadian literary community. 

“I know that someone at home is reading my work right now, and we’re connected across the sea,” she explains. 

Her enduring participation is a testament to NIFCA’s significance not only as a showcase for Barbadian talent, but also as a cultural homecoming for artists abroad. For Best, every entry is another opportunity to return through her words, reaffirm her belonging and contribute to the literary life of the country that continues to inspire her. (PR)