Stephen James Smith is an Irish poet, whose work has been seen by millions of people, leading him to perform with people like Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), Patti Smith and Bono (U2). Stephen has performed at Glastonbury, the Nuyorican Poetry Café in New York, the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and many more places in between. Follow him online @sjswords or find his poetry here: https://linktr.ee/sjswords
photo by Sabine Dundure
Jo Morrigan Black is a Paris-born poet and visual artist of Irish, French and American nationalities. They bridge seas through poetry and cultural anthropology, investigating migration paths and experiences of liminality. Jo has worked with indigenous leaders in Colombia, left stray feathers in Berlin and stalked the streets of Dublin as a vampire. Their stage performances combine poetry, physical theatre and drag in order to celebrate the queer and the unknowable in each of us.
Kieran Beville is author of Write Now – A Guide to Becoming a Writer (Limerick Writers Centre, 2019). He has had a substantial number of poems and articles published in various newspapers, journals and magazines and four collections of poetry (Revival Press). His book, Pulling Back the Clouds is a short biography of Mike Kelly, collector of the die-cast model aircraft display at Shannon Airport (Limerick Writers Centre, 2020). In April 2022 Beville was appointed Poet Laureate for Limerick
Alex Vellis is a Greek-British poet, producer and playwright from Canterbury, Kent. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent and has published five books through Whisky & Beards Publishing. Vellis’ work challenges the ideas of hope and home, love and futility, and identity and place. His new book ‘I saw a bird once’ follows the lives of three people as they explore change in a working-class world His work has been used in schools in the Netherlands and in young offender’s institutes in the United States as a way to both display poetry and present a way to better understand our emotions. Vellis has performed both nationally and internationally as a poet, gracing stages in Paris, London, Oxford, and Malta. As well as delivering lectures at universities and festivals on events production, being a working-class artist, and poetry in the larger sphere. Alex has produced the majority of Kent’s poetry events for the last five years, including the online poetry festival (in conjunction with Connor Sansby and co) ‘Winchesterfest’ – for which he gained his second (unsanctioned) world record for producing poetry events. Currently, he is a poetry editor for a publishing house and an axe-throwing instructor.
Jennifer K Dick is the author of That Which I Touch Has No Name (Black Spring Press Group, London, 2022), Lilith: A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt, 2019), Circuits (Corrupt, 2013) and Fluorescence (University of GA Press, 2004) as well as 6 chap/artbooks. She has worked as a literary editor & reader for Versal (Amsterdam), Upstairs at Duroc (Paris), & The Colorado Review, has taught Creative Writing Workshops for WICE, the Paris Writers Workshop , Kent University’s Paris in The Arts, Strasbourg Write a Story, and guest taught for Naropa and LIU Brooklyn’s MFA programs. She directs the UHA English Dept., curates Ivy Writers Paris & co-organizes “Écrire L’Art” at Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d’Art Contemporain. Originally from Iowa, residing in France for over 20 years, she has also lived in Norwich, England, Colorado, and Massachusetts, and traveled extensively. Thus she is interested in writing about place and displacement, and global polyphony—that is, the connections we have to our language as it slips in and out of the languages of others. Recent projects include completing the manuscript Shelf Break, the writing of a chapbook of shipwreck-related poems for Tupelo’s 30/30 project. She is on the panel judging the 2023 SWAS short fiction contest. For more: Blog: http://jenniferkdick.blogspot.fr
Nicholas Calderbank is a British actor and director based in Paris. He has worked extensively in cinema, television and theatre. (And–in our words and not his– is a consummate professional). Founder of the On Stage and Open Space theatre companies he has produced plays by Shakespeare, Pinter, Mamet and others.In recent times he has focused on writing and performing his own material.
Damian Corcoran is an actor, and director as well as a voice artist and language coach. He has been acting in France for over 25 years and has a wide experience in theatre, film dubbing and voice overs, primarily in English.Theatre is his passion and he has acted in and helped produce a number of plays from Shakespeare to Neil Labute in theatres in and around Paris such as Le Nesle, L’Atelier, and Le Sudden. He regularly performs in public readings for Moving Parts Paris and presents his own poetry for Spoken Word Paris. He is co-founder of Brava Productions, and Open Globe Theatre Paris.Specialising in English narrations for documentaries, Damian is an accomplished voice actor and dubber working for some of the biggest film and TV production companies in Paris such as Studio Lincoln, Dubbing Bros, Ce Qui Meut as well as Arte, Canal+ and Imagine.
Fiamma Bennett has been performing and creating dramatic and comedic works since 2010 in English and French. In 2008, Most recently, In 2022, she shot a television mini-series “L’île Prisonnière”.Continuing her collaboration with directors Jos Houben and Emily Wilson, she played Despair in the English mask “Cupid and Death” In 2018 she worked with Theatraverse as an actress and toured at the Edinburgh Festival in the bilingual play “Monsieur Somebody” She also played Hedda in “Hedda Gabler” (Ibsen) at the Jonquière theater; had the honor of reading for Peter Brook. She is part of a first adaptation of Deadmans cellphone in French: “Appels en Absence” at Lucernaire, recites in English the role of Cordelia in “King Lear”, She played in a Dadaist piece “Répertoire” in 2014. She has also participated in many short films, including Something Like That which was selected to open the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, and received the Best Actress award for the 24 Hour Film Project in 2014 for her role in”Kidnapping”. She also shot “A Poem of a House” for the National Trust, which allows visitors to see William Morris’ women come to life on the walls of his home, The Red House.
Born in London, and trained in the UK, Kester Lovelace has been living and working in Paris for over 30 years. He is associate artistic director of Drama Ties – a professional theatre company, which he founded in 1999, and for whom he’s written and directed a dozen shows. He also directed the first French production of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing in 2009 in Paris, and on tour. On screen, he’s worked alongside Clémence Poésy in Jeanne Captive, Alex Lawther and Lambert Wilson in Les Traducteurs, and coming soon, with Léa Seydoux in La bête. He also works as a voice-over artist, on commercial, corporate and documentary projects, as well as radio fiction. He’s a coach and acting teacher at theatre schools in Paris, including the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique. His podcast drama, My Lunch with Frank will be released in 2023.
Joanna Bartholomew Performing very early became central to Joanna. Coming to France as a young adult, she pursues the quest for the link between the body and the spirit, which continues today in her approach to acting. Actress and director, she also creates costumes and objects. She is the artistic director of Compagnie Lynx: http://www.cie-lynx.com;
Robert William Bradford is an American actor who worked extensively in San Francisco and Los Angeles before relocating to France; Nick directed him in his first stage roles in Paris – as Lee in True West and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Fate (and Nick’s writing talent) has brought them back together and this time they share the stage…both literally and figuratively!
Last week at the Hirondelle was great – great crowd, great poetry.
But unfortunately the Hirondelle has been hit with a large police fine for noise in front of the bar and have decided to stop doing events like ours.
SpokenWord will be back next Monday 23rd Jan, venue to be announced.
Cheers all,
David Barnes
Walt Whitman said to have great poets, you must have great audiences.
And with the temporary closure of the Chat Noir’s basement ours has been dropping. And no wonder! Not everyone wants to battle to be heard in a noisy bar nor strain to hear the poetry. We lost something of what made SpokenWord at the Chat Noir special – the quiet, the attention of all those people listening to each poet, listening like what they said was vital. We lost the ‘safe enough’ space that those walls and door provided that allowed anyone to step up and wear their heart on their sleeve and risk being vulnerable or take a chance trying out something new.
We lost, in short, something that made SpokenWord Paris magical.
So.
As the news is that the Chat Noir’s basement will stay closed for up to 4 months…
We’re moving on Monday to try out SpokenWord in a similar space… the ‘cave’ of the Hirondelle bar, 25 rue de l’Hirondelle 75006 just near Métro Saint Michel.
Come out and support SpokenWord!
Siobhán “Shiv” Hickey is a Dublin-based actor, poet and Artistic Director of After Midnight Theatre.With over 20 years experience in performance, Shiv has been involved in all aspects of the stage from writing to directing to producing to marketing. In 2018, Shiv developed and performed her one woman comedy show ‘Dear Diary… and other notions of a romantic nature’ which was also performed at Dublin’s FRAYED fringe Festival in 2019. Shiv wrote ‘Voices’ and ‘Dear Death’ both of which were performed as part of the Smock Allies Scene+Heard Festival in Smock Alley, 2020 and 2022 respectively. Both shows received top reviews describing her work as “honest”, “evocative”, and “pure poetry”. This year she directed and produced the first full length production for After Midnight Theatre, ‘Reasons to be Pretty’ which sold out 5 nights in the Teachers’ Club and received some amazing feedback. Shiv has published two collections of poetry ‘After Midnight’ (2020) and ‘Scribbles from an Anxious Mind’ (2022) – some of which she has performed in venues around Dublin and on The Word Stage at Electric Picnic 2022. Her work is influenced by the works of Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, and Emily Dickinson, as well as by modern Irish spoken word artists Vagabond Queen and Emmet O’Brien and the music of Paddy Dennehy and MILCK.
More details to follow
SpokenWord Paris 