Mia Funk – artist, writer, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process traveling exhibition and international educational initiative. (Please link to: www.creativeprocess.info)  Mia’s portraits of writers and artists appear in many public collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, Dublin Writers Museum, Office of Public Works, American Writers Museum (forthcoming), and other museums and culture centers. Funk has received many awards and honors, including the Prix de Peinture from the Salon d’Automne de Paris and has exhibited at the Grand Palais, Paris. She was commissioned by the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival to paint their 30th-anniversary commemorative painting of over 20 jazz legends. Her paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud won the Thames & Hudson Pictureworks Prize and were exhibited in Brussels for Bacon’s centenary, in Paris at the American University, as well as international arts festivals in Europe. As a writer and interviewer, contributes to various national publications. She served on the National Advisory Council of the American Writers Museum 2016-17. The Creative Process traveling exhibition is being held at leading universities, museums, culture centers around the world.

Janine Booth is a Marxist motormouth, who is in the second half of her poetry adventure having ranted in the 1980s and recomposed in 2014. She writes and performs poems funny and serious, formal and random. Janine’s poems have been published in numerous mags and anthologies, and in four of her own little books. Check out her website:  http://www. janinebooth.com/

Zachary Coffin (in his own words) is an unsuccessful writer and mediocre actor, somewhat known as that #EvilWhiteGuy in Bollywood.  He graduated from fancy schools with legendary teachers, and lives in their shadows, still learning.  He’s from California and has worked in 30 countries; but Mumbai meri jaan. Zack’s mother performs at SpokenWord Paris; he thought it might delight her if he did, too. http://www.youtube.com/ZacharyCoffinPage; http://www.imdb.me/ZacharyCoffin

Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of eight 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); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… 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 Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Hanniffa Patterson is a Jamaican who has lived in Paris for over 6.5 years and in France for 8. She has been writing and hoarding her poetry since she was 5 years old, but truly got the courage to share her work 6 years ago at Spokenword Paris. Since then she‘ll read for whoever will listen. Her poetry often has themes of love, heartbreak, religion and identity.  She enjoys travelling, photography, meeting new people and dressing up. She loves cake and hates endives, both with equal passion.

Jeffrey Greene has published five collections of poetry, most recently Beyond Our Means (2016).  He is the author of the memoir French Spirits and three personalized nature books.  A fourth nature book, Seven Music Forests, is under contract. He is also the author of Shades of the Other Shore, a book of mixed genre writing: sketches, prose pieces, and poetry written in collaboration with painter Ralph Petty. His writing has been supported by the NEA, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and Rinehart Fund, and he was a winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Randall Jarrell Award, and the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award.  His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Ploughshares, Agni, Kenyon Review, and the anthologies Strangers in Paris, Intimacy, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to Flash Sequence. He is professor at the American University of Paris and mentors for the Pan-European MFA Program.

Thou cream faced loon!

You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!

There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune!

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday (and deathday) once again so at SpokenWord we’re celebrating with a theme of:

Insults, Shakespearean and otherwise 

It’s 11 years and more since I started this open mic night in Paris and for once it’s come round on the day that also happens to be my birthday. So for as far as I can remember the first time, I’m gonna take the stage for the featured poet spot myself instead of just having 5 minutes. And I’ll read some things new and most likely some old favourites.

It’s brought me so much poetry and joy and friends and drunken nights and fun and even the occasional lover, this SpokenWord Paris night. Long may it continue and many thanks to all of you who’ve sailed with me on these Monday nights and whose company has made Paris so much of what it has been for me. Without you, this would not have become home, where the wandering stopped and poetry grew and flourished.

What? Oh, yes, I’ll be 47.

And not cycling home drunk (and falling off my bike twice) like my 40th, celebrated at SpokenWord back in the day when we did it at the Culture Rapide.

Drop in, come down, and raise a glass or share an insult, Shakespearean or otherwise!

Cheers all,

David Barnes

Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows!

Thou art as loathsome as a toad! I do desire we may be better strangers! Your virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese.

Moe Seager has published 5 books of poetry and will issue his next collection with Onslaught press, Oxford, U.K. Seager also leads jazz ensembles in Paris and New York and other cities as a singing jazz poet. He is the host of the Paris poetry series Angora Poets. His work has been published by le Ministère de la Culture France. His work has been translated into French and Arabic by Cairo press, Egypt. Seager won a Golden Quill award for investigative journalism and a Human Rights award from the University of Pittsburgh

Iris Colomb is an artist, poet, curator, and translator based in London. Throughout her practice she explores different relationships between form and content, applying a design approach to poetic projects. She has given individual, collaborative and interactive performances in both France and the UK (including the Royal Court Theater, the Arnolfini, and Tate Modern). Her poems have been published in Zarf, Pocket Litter and Datableed; and her co-translation, with Elliot Koubis, of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘The Stories and Adventures of the Baron d’Ormesan’, was published by Ampersand in 2017.
Iris has been resident artist and poet at the Centre For Recent Drawing, she is now the art Editor of Haverthorn magazine, and a member of the interdisciplinary collective ‘No Such Thing’. Her work has been showcased in the collective exhibition ‘We Fiddle While Rome Burns’ (Donetsk 2014), sold at auction in Versailles (2015), and ‘Semechki’ (Семечки), her collaboration with Russian poet Eta Dahlia, has recently been exhibited at the National Poetry Library. She also curates events seeking possibilities beyond the traditional format of poetry readings, each of which acts as a separate live experiment, linking poetry and other art-forms such as film, visual arts, sound, and design.