SpokenWord Paris

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

Malik Ameer Crumpler is a poet, composer, curator, editor & professor involved in over 60 albums, several GlitchArt films, Artbooks, literature anthologies & 9 books of Poetry.  Originally from Oakland, California Malik has lived in Paris since 2016 after 12 years in NYC co-founding, hosting & editing   Madmenscalling, Those That This & Visceral Brooklyn.  Currently, Malik is an Editor-at-Large for The Opiate while teaching Creative Writing & Advanced English at several Universities in Paris, France. His new limited edition Artbook of poems & non-poems  « …&? » is only available at The Red wheelbarrow bookstore & at readings such as this one.

Leah Soeiro is a photographer, writer and translator based in Paris. She has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Kent. She is the current President of Paris Lit Up and Editor-in-Chief for the magazine by the same name. She runs a creative writing workshop together with the writers Chris Newens and Clairette Durand-Gasselin. Her poems have been published in Sunbow zine, Feast and Tint Journal. Her poetry-photography collection twenty-twenty-twenty-twenty-one came out with Querencia Press in the fall of 2023. She teaches creative writing and theatre to children. She is currently working on a novel.

Dylan Harris, www.dylanharris.org, has had five poetry collections and
two chapbooks published, and has published five photography artist’s
books. His most recent collection is Flowers of Esch, published by the
Knives Forks and Spoons Press last year. When living in Paris, he
revived Poets Live, and set up corrupt press, www.corruptpress.com.

Jasmine Vegas from NYC was an ex-clothing designer gone chanteuse accompanying herself on accordion in the early 90’s when she travelled to Paris for love but ended up staying for the cheese. Parisians delighted in her offbeat extravagant style as the bar sensation of the late 90’s with her group Jasmine Bande (with an ‘E’) then in the aughts veering electro as Jasmine Vegas. More recently, she’s been delivering ‘old school’ rap or, as her friend Black Sifichi sez, “She got the words, the music, delivery, nuance, the grooves; on stage she got the moves; great bitchy stuff for these Covidy times.”