SpokenWord Paris

Beth is from Alsager the North West of England. She was born in 1985 and grew up between England and France. She has a BA in Art History and moved to Paris in 2008 where she gained a few years experience working in International Business Development whilst experimenting the performance scenes in Paris. She left the corporate path in 2011 after taking part in aa artists showcase in Parallax Art Fayre, London. She writes and performs poetry, and has been involved in putting together and acting in improvised theater productions, classic theater, Art Happenings, Short Films, and events. She currently juggles acting / events work, and english / theater workshops. In 2015 / 16 she will be working on a one woman play and aims to direct her first short film in February 2016. To be kept abreast of her activity, you can send an email with the subject line “newsletter” to peacockwanderer@gmail.com.

Deborah Bogen’s three books of poems are “Living by the Children’s Cemetery,” “Landscape with Silos” and “Let Me Open You a Swan.”  Her young adult novel “The Witch of Leper Cove; was published in 2014.

Theme – Photographs

Pittsburgh’s Deborah Bogen

Theme – Baksheesh

Our guest poet Iris Colomb co-organised Spraypaint Poetry underneath London’s Waterloo station – what was that I hear you thinking. See here for an article about it. She also cohosted Metrotextuel.

Janine Booth (www.janinebooth.com) is a poet, trade unionist, author and lefty campaigner from the UK. As ‘The Big J’, Janine was part of the 1980s ‘ranting poetry’ movement, and last year took up the muse again, publishing a poetry book, Mostly Hating Tories, earlier this year. Expect angry but funny verse aiming furious fire at Tories, class inequality, domestic violence, normality and more!
“Utterly magnificent” – Phill Jupitus.
“I saw her at Spoken Word London and she was great!” – David Barnes.

The theme is The Harsh Light of Day.

Zarina Zabrisky and Simon Rogghe write merging voices and genres and travel around the US and Europe, performing poetry to music, blending choreography and visual arts to create literary theater shows. Their first book of collaborative poetry, Green Lions (Numina Press), was called “a hugely multifaceted, multigenred piece of art” and a manual for transformation” by critics in the US and UK.

Simon Rogghe is a poet and fiction writer. He was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Belgium, where he got his MA in Philosophy. A polyglot, he speaks English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian. After traveling in the US and Europe, competing at horse shows as a professional rider, he found a home in the San Francisco Bay Area. When not working on his PhD in French literature, he also translates French surrealism as well as contemporary fiction. His work is published in over 30 literary journals. He is the co-author of Green Lions (Numina Press). http://www.simonrogghe.com

Zarina Zabrisky is the author of three short story collections, including EXPLOSION (forthcoming in 2015), a novel We, Monsters (Numina Press) and Green Lions, co-authored with Simon Rogghe. Zabrisky moved to San Francisco from Moscow to escape the aftermath of a collapsing communist empire. She wrote traveling around the world as a street artist, oilfield translator, and a kickboxing instructor, and started to publish her work in 2011. Since then, Zabrisky’s work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong and Nepal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award for Achievement in The Avant Garde. She is a co-founder of The Arts Resistance (www.artsresistance.com). http://www.zarinazabrisky.com

Adeena Karasick is a New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of seven books of poetry and poetics. Writing at the intersection of Conceptualism and neo-Fluxus performatics, her urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard) and 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). Most recently is This Poem (Talonbooks, 2012) and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014). She teaches Literature, Critical Theory and Performance at Pratt in New York and is co-founding Director of KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” has just been established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Rita Malikonyte Mockus, born in Lithuania, is a classically trained pianist who has studied philosophy and creative writing and has a degree in art history. Her poetry has appeared in Salos (Sviesa Press, Lithuania). She was a featured vocal performer and wrote a cycle of poems set to Jasenka’s electro­acoustic recording “An Artist and a Plane” for the Electroshock label in 2004. She also wrote the lyrics to the work “Yoin,” which was performed at the National Philharmonic of Lithuania in Vilnius. In 2007 she read her poetry at the City of Asylum annual Jazz Poetry Concert alongside saxophonist Jimmy Carter from World Saxophone Quartet and drummer Roger Humphries. In 2013, she read at the Bonfire Reading Series together with Moe Seager, an American­French jazz poet. Mockus writes cultural criticism for the Autumn House Press and the online magazine Sampsonia Way. She also collaborates with local video artists, is a member of Zero Prestige, a Pittsburgh poetry collective, and contributes her poems to its monthly journal. She is currently working on her book of poems She­Rif s.