NAGB Associate Curator Letitia Pratt Published in Small Axe: Poetry and Body Politics

NAGB’s Associate Curator Letitia Pratt was recently published in Small Axe’s sx salon ↗, “a [digital] literary platform for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.” It’s a proud moment for her and a great representation of the talent who work at the museum. Letitia isn’t afraid to make stylistic choices—choices with a point of view. “Poets should care about form,” she says. This notion underpins her curatorial approach. Just like writing, curating is asserting a perspective; it’s an act of authorship. “Poetry informs everything I do, including my curatorial practice,” Letitia says.

Published quarterly, sx salon “engages regional and diasporic understandings of our changing realities.” Operating in the diaspora is something Letitia is no stranger to. In 2016, she completed a residency at Fresh Milk Barbados, took part in the regional conference Tilting Axis, and has been published in several Caribbean journals, including PREE, WomanSpeak, Bookmarked: PREE New Caribbean Writing, and the Caribbean Writer. She also lived in Chicago for two years while obtaining her MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there that Letitia described experiencing an “out of body” feeling—unmoored, far from home in Nassau, processing deep emotion through her writing. There, she conceived “In perpetuity”, one of three poems that she successfully submitted to the 48^th issue of sx salon, recently published in February 2025. 

“In perpetuity” continues Letitia’s ongoing dissection of tropes of women—from everyday women to female Biblical figures. One stanza reads, “I useta say Ine no big pu**y gyal but I change my mind.” In this line alone, Letitia is grappling with body politics, moral judgment, and in a sense, finding home in her body. In The Bahamas and wider Caribbean, society tends to impose moral judgments on women disproportionately to men. With this work, Letitia reclaims her body, rejecting societal expectations and bravely accepting something innately human: sexuality.

The poem is visceral, evoking unctuous images of the Caribbean—rich flora, wet earth, warm oceans—all beautifully woven together with a thread of desire. Phrases like “red-fat” and “like the water, I am forever heady with fullness” are both romantic and primal, evoking a tension familiar to many Caribbean women.

How then does poetry translate to her curatorial practice?

“Poetry helps me to see the macrocosmic picture,” she says. Letitia likes to free write, then give her ideas time to gestate. After that, she’ll refine and edit with a kind of precision necessary for curating. This reflects her exploration of femininity as a continuous balance of instinct and restraint. Most recently, she curated A Small Remainder of Teeth: Ecohorror and the Anti-Paradise at the NAGB, an exhibition built around an erasure poem by one of her contemporaries, Sonia Farmer. Through poetic framing and an intentional focus on what language says, and leaves out, Letitia curated a show that explored the landscape as a living, breathing being, with a hint of wrath. Like much of her work, it is rooted in romance, healing, and the divine feminine; each aspect is carefully considered, framed by the language of poetry, and placed in conversation with each other. That is curation.