SpokenWord Paris

Kiwi talks too much (they/them) – a queer poet, philosopher, activist, depressivist from Amsterdam. Last year Kiwi travelled to perform poetry all over Europe: in dingy bars where people only spoke Spanish, joined a poetry slam in London and wrote poetic street art in the alleyways of Paris. Kiwi self-published a chapbook called ‘Waiting for the Hidden Track’ with drawings by their hand and even a CD with spoken word recordings. In 2024 they were allowed to join that year’s class of the Amsterdam Poetry Circle. All in all, writing poetry seems to be the one self-destructive coping mechanism they have fallen in love with and that’s here to stay. Kiwi’s work allows the listener to peek under the hood of their mental health, often explores relationships and politics. It can be hard hitting, emotional, a little cynical, but always honest and punk. Oh, and their book is for sale for a variable donation price, so if you like their act: come talk to them after the show. They take visa, mastercard, hugs and cash.
@kiwitalkstoomuch.poetry
kiwitalkstoomuch.wordpress.com

Born in the fog of San Francisco, Nicolette Daskalakis is a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist based in Paris. Her work blurs the boundaries between the literary, cinematic, and artistic—offering a multimedia landscape populated by paradox, pop-culture references, and dark humour. She is the author of “Portrait of Your Ex Assembling Furniture” (2018) and the forthcoming poetry collection “Tell Me I’m Not on Fire” (2025). Her writing has been anthologized by HarperCollins, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and published in numerous literary journals. Nicolette received a Bachelors in Film & Television Production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a Masters in Fine Arts from the institut supérieur des art et du design de Toulouse. You can find her online at www.nicolettedaskalakis.com or on Instagram @hellonicolette and @nicolettepoetry

Christian Yeo Xuan (christianyeoxuan.com) is a writer and actor from Singapore based in Paris. His work has been published in Oxford Poetry, The Mays and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, placed 2nd for the Aryamati Poetry Prize, came in 3rd for the National Poetry Competition, and was shortlisted for the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the Bridport Prize, and the Sykes Prize. He was a finalist at Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp, and has workshopped with the Asia Creative Writing Programme and Berlin Writer’s Workshop. He has received support from the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops and the National Arts Council. He holds a BA in Law from Cambridge (Double First Class Honours), where he topped his year in Labour Law.

Leo Zelada. – Literary pseudonym of Braulio Rubén Tupaj Amaru Grajeda Fuentes. Poet and writer. He has published the collections of poems Delirium Tremens, Diario de un Cyberpunk, Opuscule de un Nosferatu a punto fe Amanecer, La Senda del Dragón, Minimal Poetica and Transpoética.His work has been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Greek, Arabic, etc.He has a blog called Diary of a Dragon that has more than 300,000 views. He has won several literary awards, the last of which was the Poets of Other Worlds Award, awarded by the International Poetic Fund of Spain in 2016. In 2019, his novel El Último Nómada was published in Madrid, presented in Madrid and Paris.In 2021, his documentary titled “Leo Zelada: Transpoetica” was released, directed by director Mario Leclere, which premiered in Madrid and Paris.In March 2022 he published “Transpoétique” with the French publishing house Unicite, with which he signed books at La Marché de la Poesie and read his texts at the Pantheon of the Sorbonne University.This June 2024, his new book La Travesía del Innonamable has just been released in French.

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko 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.  After his death, it was his friend, the late great Kathleen Raine, who took an interest in her writing and encouraged her to publish.  A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and a former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, she is widely published. She has been a featured guest at Shakespeare & Company, on a number of occasions, as well as performed or read in other literary venues in the City of Light and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in (among others) XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France) and Maintenant : Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is the 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 Joseph Murray for her outstanding service to international writers through SpokenWord Paris where she is Writer/ Poet in Residence.  Her selected poems On the Way to Invisible was recently published by The Opiate Books and is now available. 

Josh Cake has published poetry in Breakwater Review, Teesta Review, and Messages from the Embers, and has held performance residencies in Australia, Italy, and France. Josh writes poetry for both page and stage, and has won a number of writing and performance prizes, including holding the number one ranking in Australia’s National Poetry Slam. The winner of the Best Multilingual Performer award from Arts de Paris, the Most Prolific Artist award from The Weekly Beckett, and the Peseroff Poetry Prize from the University of Massachusetts, Josh teaches poetry writing and performance in universities from Australia to China and Morocco. Josh is currently touring Europe and Africa with the spoken word album ‘words to regret when i’m better at editing’. You can find Josh on Instagram at @joshcakemusic or download the album at www.joshcake.com

Suzanne Allen is an artist and writing teacher born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. In the middle of a whirlwind career in interior design in her twenties, she had a house fire, which led her back to college where she studied French, then writing, then ran away to Paris several times before finally completing an MFA in Poetry on her 37th birthday. She then followed love back to Paris, as one does, and then a few years later, dragged her heartbreak home to Long Beach—writing, publishing, and editing all the way. Her poems appear widely in print and online journals, and among other projects, she served as a coeditor for the The Bastille: The Literary Magazine of Spoken Word Paris. Her first full-length collection, We Wash Our Hands, is a self-published accidental memoir of the first year of the COVID lockdown, and this is how her Paris poems became a prequel called Awkward. It had simmered for a decade, and though all these years later she mostly stays put, she still never knows if she’s coming or going, only that she’s lucky, and grateful, and craves sleep.

David Barnes has been reading his poems aloud in Paris bars since 2003. The best of them were published last year as Poets Are Liars Who Tell The Truth (corrupt press) after extensive road-testing at the weekly open mic and writers’ community he fathered, Spoken Word Paris. Poems that bite, such as ‘Bitter Valentine’, love poems, fun poems, poems about Paris ‘who dances by numbers but longs to release jazz…’ and poems that dive into dark waters – the ties of love and suffering that bind him to family back in England, where everyone haunted their own lives. Born Reading, 1971.

Cecilia Woloch is the author of a novel and six collections of poems, most recently an expanded and updated edition of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, which has been given multi-lingual, multi-media performances in Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Athens and elsewhere; a poem from the new edition was also included in a memorial exhibit at Auschwitz -Birkenau in 2021. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, CEC/ArtsLink International and the Center for International Theatre Development, as well as a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in The Best American Poetry series. Her work has been published in translation in French, German, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Romanes. She collaborates regularly with musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, and filmmakers. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in rural Kentucky, she has traveled the world as a poet and teacher.

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Alex Vellis (they/them) is a Greek-British poet, poetry editor, producer, playwright and installation artist.They hold an MA in Creative Writing and are an associate artist at Open School East, Margate. Vellis’ work explores queering the self, the liminal, the environment, the benthic, identity and place. Their latest book I saw a bird once follows the lives of three people as they explore futilism in a working-class world. Alex has performed nationally and internationally as a poet, on stages in Paris, London, Oxford, and Malta. They have also delivered lectures at universities and festivals on events production, being a working-class artist, and poetry in the larger sphere.Their next book where the flowers grow is set to be released in 2025 through Rebel Satori Press.

Jane Yevgenia Muschenetz resettled in the United States as a child refugee from Soviet Ukraine. Recognized in 2023 for excellence in Poetry Performance by San Diego County, Jane won the 2024 California and National Press Women Communications Prizes and the Poetry Collection of the Year from SDWF for her debut chapbook, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her 2024 feminist poetry collection, POWER POINT, is available for pre-order from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Connect with Jane and her work online at www.PalmFrondZoo.com

photo by Sabine Dundure