Writing can often be a task: something we have to do for work, school, or a project of some kind. What happens when we make joy the focus of our writing? Join me on a treasure hunt through the moments when we feel most whole, well, and at peace within ourselves. We’ll let these moments of joy serve as lanterns along the way of living on purpose. Bring a pen/pencil/crayons/coloured pencils (anything you’d like to write with), and some blank pages. Let’s scribble our way into joy.

Alake Pilgrim is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago in the Caribbean. She is a graduate of New York University and of the University of East Anglia in the UK, thanks to the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. She has been part of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Callaloo Journal’s Creative Writing Workshop, and the Cropper Foundation Writers Workshop. Her stories have twice been awarded the regional prize for the Americas in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. They have been published by The Center for Fiction in New York and in the international anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby (HarperCollins 2019), along with authors she admires such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, Aminatta Forna, and more. Alake is at work on her first adult literary novel and a fantasy adventure for Middle Grade readers – both set on the uncanny island of Trinidad.