Yazmin Monet Watkins is a poet, comedian, writer, actress, educator and organizer. Touring her intimate yet political poetry from Obama’s White House to Johannesburg, and empowering students from Harvard to youth prisons, Watkins’ body of work weaves art and activism, exploring the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, self-love and all things Black Girl Magic. A Posse scholar and a graduate of Dickinson College, Watkins’ work combines art and activism, providing critical artistic outlets for audiences to self advocate and heal. Watkins has developed pilots with Netflix and Comedy Central alongside Paul Downs, Lucia Aniello and her all Black female comedy group, Obama’s Other Daughters. You can see their work on their Comedy Central show and their Shondaland podcast You Down? Watkins serves as the co-chair of the Arts & Culture committee for Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. Once Beyoncé said she liked her hair.
Poet, essayist, fiction writer, playwright, art critic, translator, Serbian-born Nina Zivancevic published 17 books of poetry. She has also written three books of short stories, two novels and 2 books of essays published in Paris, New York and Belgrade. The recipient of many literary awards, a former assistant to Allen Ginsberg, she has also co-edited numerous anthologies of contemporary world poetry. She has contributed to New York Arts Magazine, Modern Painters, American Book Review, East Village Eye, Republique de lettres. She has lectured at Naropa University, New York University and the Harriman Institute in the U.S., she has taught British studies at La Sorbonne and the History of Avant-garde Theatre at Paris 8 University in France.She has actively worked for theatre ( with the “Living Theatre”in NYC) and radio( 4 of her plays were emitted in the U.S. and Great Britain). She lives and works in Paris.
Unfortunately Sophia has Covid and can’t perform because she might still be contagious.
So… this event will now include an OPEN MIC section, as announced at SpokenWord on Monday.
The open mic will follow the sets by David Barnes (poetry from his forthcoming book) and Kristina Vaughan (songs from her first and forthcoming second album, plus a few covers).
Sign up for the open mic from 7pm at L’Impasse, 4 cité Griset, round the corner from the Chat Noir. Métro Ménilmontant or Parmentier.
William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1945 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he went to Rutgers University, studying classics, music and psychology, on which he declined to follow up or to practice. He has worked in many different fields of endeavor, including amusement parks, banks, book stores, cinema, door-to-door sales (like Abbott and Costello), poker games, restaurants, taxi driving and warehouses. A forty-five-year resident of Paris, he now earns his living as an English language trainer and translator. He is the former co-editor of Upstairs at Duroc. He is the author of several volumes of poetry (all slim) and has given readings too endemic to cite around Paris, but also in the States. His other principal interests are various forms of combat sports and old music (doo-wop, Gregorian chant, hippie music, Czerny). He is Archon of Paris for the Moorish Orthodox Church and a member of various other organizations embracing a few essential beliefs and having even fewer doctrines and eschews the party of Evil.
Up until two weeks ago, Jillian Montilla (elle/she/her) was a part-time poet and a full-time master’s student in human rights at the Paris School of International Affairs. She’s still a part-time poet, but now she’s just unemployed. In 2020, Jill was named the U.N. Women Spoken Word Youth Poet. Partaking in the age-old tradition of poetry and activism, she has taught workshops on spoken word to migrant women’s groups and performed her poetry for the United Nations and international feminist organizations. Her poetry and essays, which unpack her Filipinx-American identity, have been published in textbooks and independent youth journals and magazines.
Xoài Elda David (pronounced s-why) is a Third Culture Kid who grew up in eight different countries. She studied Graphisme at LISAA applied arts school and Book Design at Ecole Estienne. Xoài has published several poems and short stories, and performed as well as hosted at International House of Poets Shanghai (IHOP) and Spoken Word Paris. Her radio play ‘One Way Ticket’ was performed by Moving Parts Theatre Group. As a co-founder of Organisation to Decolonise International Schools (ODIS), she hosts webinars, writes articles and manages social media. She and her father were once on the front page of the Jawa Pos (Java Post) Indonesian newspaper. Mother of frogs and freelance designer, Xoài is taking a gap year to finish her novel and save up for a Masters in scientific illustration.
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 12 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, (The Institute of General Semantics Press: Language in Action, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera; Salomé: Woman of Valor CD, (NuJu Records, 2020), and Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Bruce Edward Sherfield is (in my own words) a brilliant writer, director, actor, voice-over artist, artist and good guy. Most recently known for Detroit: Become Human (2018), Coldhearts: A Poetical (Part One) (2020) and Black Box (2021), he also co-runs AWOL WRITERS– The Invisible Paris Workshop where he guides, instructs and inspires. In his own words ””Bruce Edward Sherfield. Unidentified Flying Artist. Faking Over the World. One Mind at a Time. Paris.” We are honored and very pleased to invite Bruce to present to us one of his theatre pieces–Countricide: Dancing in the Purple.(Dramatic reading by Rufo Quintavalle and Tori Johnson)
Rufo Quintavalle was born in London in 1978, studied at Oxford and the University of Iowa and now lives in Paris. He is the author of ten books of poetry, the most recent of which, Shelf, is a line-by-line rewrite of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. His earlier collection, Weather Derivatives, is currently being translated into French and Portuguese. Rufo has taught creative writing at NYU Paris and for many years ran the reading series, “Poets Live”. Rufo is also an actor with experience working in theatre, film and television. He plays the role of Hadrian Bunch in Coldhearts: a poetical, an experimental project mixing poetry and film.Coldhearts is directed by Bruce Edward Sherfield and features many members of the Paris poetry scene. You can currently see Rufo at the cinema in the film Les passagers de la nuit, directed by Mikhaël Hers and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Emmanuelle Béart.
Tori Johnson is an artist who has worked primarily in Sacramento, Minneapolis, and London. She has recently moved to Paris, France in 2021 to pursue acting, directing, and creating!She has always had a passion for creating spaces– spaces that are bold, exciting, unique, open, inclusive, and connected. She started her journey being a part of amazing spaces as an actor at Guthrie’s BFA Actor Training Program and the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Education Program in London. Then she found a love for creating inventive spaces for the actor to do their best work in directing both theatre and film. Fortunate enough to experience the joys of creating energized spaces in the classroom as a founding member and Program Director of the Northern California School of the Arts, she continued to create spaces for actors, students, teachers, and other creators. www.norcalsota.orgwww.exploratori.me
Richard Krawiec is an award-winning writer in both the U.S. and France. His French novels, Paria, Vulnerables, Dandy, and most recently Les Paralysés, were published by Tusitala Editions.They have received rave reviews from, among other places, Rolling Stone and L’Obs. In the States, Krawiec’s work has gained attention from the New York Times, Publishers Weekly Recommended List, Village Voice Real Life Rock Top Ten, L.A. Times and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times.
He has also published two novels, a story collection, three plays, and three books of poetry in the U.S., most recently Women Who Loved Me Despite. His investigative feature articles have won regional and national awards. His literary awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and twice from the North Carolina Arts Council. Individual stories and poems appear in Drunken Boat, Shenandoah, Sou’wester, Levure littéraire, Dublin Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, and elsewhere.
His writing is often described as focusing on the lives of the underclass, and is informed by his personal experiences. He grew up in the depressed, working class city of Brockton, Massachusetts, and his many jobs include assembly line worker, dishwasher, newspaper delivery person, truck driver, fast food and short order cook, cabbie, waiter and teacher. He has taught writing to children and adults in homeless shelters, women’s shelters, prisons (including Death Row), literacy classes, refugee resettlement collaboratives, programs that help survivors of sexual assault, drug recovery programs, housing projects and at other community sites. Krawiec designed the curriculum for, and taught for over two decades, the Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Fiction Writing online courses for UNC-Chapel Hill, winning their Excellence in Teaching Award for his efforts. He teaches Fiction, Poetry, Playwriting, Memoir and Hybrid Writing classes through a variety of community arts venues.
He is the founder of Jacar Press, a Community Active Press that supports progressive groups and individuals. Jacar publishes a diverse assortment of poetry books and also runs an internationally-focused online magazine, One.
Originally from Montreal, Lisa Pasold is the author of 5 books of fiction and poetry; Toronto’s Lemonhound Magazine says of her most recent book, The Riparian: “A spectacular agglomeration of the dank and murky, the dark and forsaken, poetry and prose, taking the reader through tragedy, loss, and transformation grounded in locations along the sodden New Orleans riverbank.” Lisa’s work has appeared in magazines such as The Atlanta Review, The Los Angeles Review, New American Writing and Billboard. www.lisapasold.com
SpokenWord Paris 