Work samples

  • Jumbie Season 1

    Excerpt from The Jumbie Season, a completed 76,736-word young-adult folklore fantasy rooted in Trinidad and Tobago tradition, completed in October 2026. Book 1 of a planned trilogy.

  • The Boatbuilder and the Schoolteacher (excerpt)

    Opening chapters of The Boatbuilder and the Schoolteacher, a completed sweet small-town romance of approximately 73,700 words, written under the pen name Eloise Marlow, completed in October 2026. Book 1 of the Salt & Bayleaf series.

About Patrice

Baltimore City  

Patrice Pilgrim is a Baltimore writer, public-school ELA teacher, and freelance writer since 2004. Her fiction is shaped by her Trinidad and Tobago heritage and by the places that form her characters: Baltimore and Maryland, Trinidad, and imagined coastal communities where family memory remains an active force. She has completed two novels. The Jumbie Season, written under her own name, is a 76,736-word young-adult folklore fantasy about a sixteen-year-old who discovers that the old stories… more

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The Jumbie Season

A young-adult folklore fantasy (76,736 words, completed October 2026). Sixteen-year-old Marisol Williams learns that the folklore carried by her grandmother — La Diablesse, the douens, Papa Bois, Mama D'Leau — is not superstition but survival knowledge, and that an inherited promise has come due. The first book of a planned trilogy, followed by The Douen Road and Mama Dlo's Toll. Artist statement: I write about what people inherit — stories, obligations, houses, warnings. In this novel, a younger generation must learn the courtesies that once protected it, and courage comes from listening carefully and accepting responsibility for a promise the heroine did not make but must answer.
 

  • The Jumbie Season, Chapter 6 in full — excerpt from the completed novel by Patrice Pilgrim

    • The Boatbuilder and the Schoolteacher (Salt & Bayleaf, Book 1)

    A sweet small-town romance (approximately 73,700 words, completed October 2026), written as Eloise Marlow. A teacher returns to a Chesapeake Bay town to settle an inherited house and meets the boatbuilder tied to its past; a story about inheritance, repair, and a later-in-life second chance. Book 1 of the Salt & Bayleaf series, followed by The Principal and the Chef and The Ferry Captain and the Librarian.
     

    • The Boatbuilder and the Schoolteacher (excerpt)