SpokenWord Paris

We are glad to announce that Nick Calderbank and Florent Simon will perform Harold Pinter’s 2-man play Victoria Station this coming Monday 25th Feb at SpokenWord.

Nick Calderbank is the founder of the On Stage theatre company and New Open Space producing plays in English in Paris by Pinter, Shakespeare, Mamet and Ayckbourn. In recent times he has been concentrating on writing and performing his own material

Florent Simon trained at  the Cours Jean-Laurent Cochet in Paris and Estudio 3 in Madrid. He directed and acted in various university productions while studying in London and is now back in Paris, ready to make the most of his time here. Currently he is exploring new theatrical forms and experiences.

SpokenWord theme: STATIONS

Cheers all,

David Barnes & Antonia Klimenko

Antonia was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary James Meary Tambimuttu of Poetry London—publisher of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few.  The former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion is widely published. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies  (among them) XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) and Maintenant :  Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the recent recipient of two grants:  one from Poets in Need, of which Michael (100 Thousand Poets for Change) Rothenberg is a co-founder; the second—the 2018 Generosity Award bestowed on her by Kathleen Spivack and Josheph Murray for her outstanding service to international writers through SpokenWord Paris where she is Writer/ Poet in Residence.

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Pennsylvania and did her literary studies at universities in the US, Switzerland and Spain. She emigrated from the US to Switzerland in 1973 and moved to Paris in 1990. Active in the Parisian poetry scene, she was a long time student of Alice Notley, and, for a few years, curated the Poets Live reading series. Her latest collections of poetry are ORANGES IN JANUARY (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2016) and IN A FORM OF SUSPENSION (corrupt press, 2014) and she has 4 previous collections.  She is a contributing editor to the British magazine, Tears in the Fence and the American magazine, Osiris. She lives in Strasbourg, writes and goes to lots of concerts and the theater. She dreams of buying a harp.

Photo Credit:  Sabine Dundure Photography

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and later taking top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. Television credits include 2 seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgement & MTV’s Free Your Mind. The Kenyon Review named Regie Cabico the “Lady Gaga of Poetry” and he has been listed in BUST magazine’s 100 Men We Love. Cabico is the recipient of a 2006 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award for his work teaching poetry at Bellevue Hospital for young adults. He most recently edited Super Stoked: An Anthology of Trans and Queer Poetry (Capturing Fire Press, 2018) .

“Dareka performs his poetry since 2005 in France, then in USA, and everywhere his feet can land on. He is now traveling through France and Europe, and the world when he has the time and the chance to do so, to satisfy his thirst for poetry. He has hosted the most popular Paris poetry weekly French venue, “Slam au Downtown”, for two years when he wasn’t rocking the stage with his experimental fusion punk jazz spoken word band, La Bête Aveugle. He is now signed into the young and dynamic music label En Garde! Records both with his band and as a solo artist.

In December 2018, he released his book « Tourbillons » (Whirlwinds), Xérographes Editions, in collaboration with Gaspard, a young graduate from the Beaux Arts de Paris. Both a collection of poems and a punk fantasy illustrations book, it represents an elegant synthesis of Dareka’s poems, once performed, sung, screamed, whispered or simply written without having ever been read out loud. Just as his life, his poems are metamorphic animals, and he’s a zoo keeper in hell. They are trees and buildings, little skeletons dancing under the moonlight, lonely kids lost in urban mazes, sewing needles stuck in his frail stupid little heart. They are maelstrom of rhymes, soda drinks in a night bar, for a drunken public. They are you, they are him, they are life and death kissing in a blink, but it does not really matter.” 

Matt Jones has studied monster lore in Afghanistan, China, Nicaragua, France, Canada and on a warship: Some monsters we discover abroad; others we carry with us. He was the winner of Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Reader’s Choice Award for his poem, “Wounded Village.” His story, “Drone,” was published in F(r)iction magazine #9. Today, Matt lives in Paris and works as the prose editor of Paris Lit Up Magazine. He writes books about giant octopuses, Bigfoot, and other fabulous beasts. 

A festive SpokenWord for those like me with no family to annoy in Paris… theme MIDWINTER, usuall SpokenWordery with sign up from 8pm, poetics begin from 8.30pm downstairs at the Chat Noir… Cheers all, David Barnes