Open Mic at Bill’s Records
Location: Bill’s Records, 1317 South Lamar (S of Downtown Dallas)
Description: Open Mic at Bill’s! Sundays at 9:00 PM until no artist is left standing! Come out for a night of spoken word, poetry, music, and comedy
Hosted by Alex P and presented by Knife Six Productions!
Bill Wisener has been a legendary Proprietor, Host and special Friend, at his store, Bill’s Records to artists for over 30 years, welcoming everyone equally as family–from you and me to Radiohead, NIN, Beastie Boys, Ben Harper, Erika Badu, and so many others; with ongoing songwriter showcases,and past and present open mic projects, including WordSpace sponsored readings. Bill’s Records is the subject of Jeffrey Liles documentary, The Last Record Store.
Fall 2010
Fall 2010
The Kessler X+ Art Gallery Reading Series
2nd Wednesdays 7-8
Hosted by Karen X and Carlos Salas of Cliff Notes
1230 W. Davis St. 6:30 pm
http://www.thekessler.org/
Special thanks to our new partners: Owner, Edwin Cabaniss, and Artistic Director, Jeffrey Liles, for making this Reading Series at The Kessler X+ Art Gallery possible..
WordSpace is proud to be part of the exciting music and arts-center- community at The Kessler. Join their Community Happy Hour before our Readings, then stay and enjoy the music of their “Residency Nights”. Please check out their website for more info and the latest schedules and news at The Kessler. www.thekessler.org
September 8
Alex Lemmon Christopher Carmona Scooter Smith ICHAT Janaka Stucky
Alex Lemon was born in Iowa, and lives in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Mosquito (Tin House Books) and Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), and is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His memoir, Happy, was published by Scribner in 2009.
Christopher Carmona hails from the Rio Grande Valley in Deep South Texas. He is beat poet following in the tradition of beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman, and Raul Salinas. Much of his work works to redefine what it means to be ‘beat’ as a poet and scholar. He is currently pursuing his PhD at Texas A&M University. He has had poems published in the Writers’ Block and Beatlick Art & News. Currently he is working on his first book of poetry simply titled beat and is editing an anthology of Beat Texas writings for UT Press with Chuck Taylor and Rob Johnson.
Janaka Stucky is the founder and managing editor of Black Ocean, and publishes the magazine Handsome. He likes his whiskey neat and his music dirty. Since receiving his BFA from Emerson and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College in 2003, he remains rooted in Boston—spending his life traveling, writing, and caring for the dead. Some of his poems appear or are forthcoming in: Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Redivider, and VOLT.
Scooter Smith is the art director and webmaster of Moonlady News, web illustrator and animator, videographer including in many video festivals.
October 6
Carlos Salas Giselle Scott Pierce ICHAT
Carlos Salas, poet/painter/ father/husband/friend/ co-proprietor of Oak Cliff’s best bookstore Cliff Notes Prolonged Media. He is also, co-host of monthly open mic reading held at Mighty Fine Arts gallery, also located in Oak Cliff. Locally, Carlos has been involved in the humanities in one form or another from literature, art, film, theatre, and music. He is a seeker of all things, harmonious, believer of all things, impermanent, believer of all things, interdependent.
RockCityPoet,Giselle –For this native of St. Thomas Virgin Islands, words became the comfort and color of her life when she was too ill to even leave her home. She moved to Ft. Worth seeking healthcare for her son two years ago and performs her soul all over the metroplex.
Scott Pierce was born in 1975 and lives for the moment in Austin with his partner, the poet Cindy St. John. He is the author of TV Poems (BlazeVox 2004) and Some Bridges Migrate (Small Fires Press 2009). He edits the publications of Effing Press which include the effing chapbook series, full-length poetry collections, and the lit/viz art journal effing magazine. www.effingpress.com
Nov. 10
Jolee Davis Amy Weaver Josh Lewis ICHAT Tom Peters
Josh Lewis is a designer/animator/illustrator/photographer/musician, and writer living in Los Angeles, former co-host of Bill’s Records Open Mic Readings in Dallas and will be bringing his spoken word animation.
Jolee Davis–Creator/Editor of Death List Five magazine (voice of the lunatic fringe). An art and literary magazine based in Dallas. Has hosted and been featured in numerous venues. She also has a rebellious hairdo. Her latest chapbook, “self righteous c**t”, is a love child of Iceberg Slim and Oprah.
Amy Weaver…Infamous in the Dallas poetry scene. 8 teams, 3 NPS final stages, and 2001 Dallas Slam Team champion in Seattle. Amy is currently working on a new book of poetry and her first novel, “Casket Girls” (historical fiction based on the mythology and violent denizens of New Orleans).
She has a fondness for bourbon and has been known to hump a few legs.
Tom Peters is the published Poet owner and proprietor of Boulder’s legendary Beat Books Shop, host of the longest continuous Open Mic and Reading Series in Boulder, a special Friend of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and Naropa University graduate. Scene Svengali, open door to the arts, music and film community who knows no strangers.
Members Only Salon
September 16 Matt BonDurant and Venus Opal Reese
Matt Bondurant was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia. His short fiction has appeared in The New England Review, Gulf Coast Review, The Hawaii Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train, among others. He has also published poems in such journals as The Notre Dame Review and Ninth Letter among others. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels The Wettest County in the World (Scribner) and THE THIRD TRANSLATION (Hyperion). He currently teaches literature and writing at University of Texas at Dallas and lives in Dallas.
Venus Opal Reese is a tenured professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, an award winning solo performer, playwright, director, choreographer and poet. She has performed nationally and internationally for over 20 years. Her solo performance work, Split Ends, was featured on the cover of the Palo Alto Weekly, showcased at the Black Repertory Theatre in Rhode Island and ran off-Broadway at La MaMa ETC. Split Ends was nominated for an AUDELCO Award. Dr. Reese was recently featured on ABC News and in Glamour Magazine and Diversity Inc., as an expert on race, beauty, and culture. Her performance with the Hip-Hop theatre play, Will Power’s The Seven, was featured in the American Theatre Magazine and won 3 Critic Choice Awards.
Venus has presented and performed internationally at the Sorbonne, Paris, France under the auspices of the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University, La MaMa Umbria International, Spoleto, Italy, and Universita di Padova, Padova, Italy. Nationally she has performed and directed with Cultural Odyssey, AfroSolo, the LA Women’s Festival, and the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, NYC.
As a scholar, Dr. Reese’s research links Africa, the Middle Passage, Antebellum Slavery, minstrelsy and popular culture through the stories we tell. She offers and designs courses in Spoken Word, Arts and Performance, Theatre, Movement Theatre, African Dance, Hip-Hop Dance, American Character, Acting, Performativity, Cultural Studies, Womanism/Feminism, Queer Theory, Literary Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Identity and Media.
Dr. Reese’s scholarly performative writing has been published in the Women and Performance journal, the Journal for Global Transformation, as well as edited volumes like Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections and The Politics of American Actor Training, both with Routledge.
November 12: Chuck Taylor and Hedwig Gorski
Chuck Taylor’s two most recent books are poetry–Heterosexual: A Love Story (Panther Creek) and Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon (Pecan Grove). Taylor has also published novels and collections of short stories. For the last twenty-one years he has taught at Texas A&M University, serving a term as Coordinator of Creative Writing. Before that he was a bit of a wanderer, and taught creative writing at the Universities of Texas at El Paso, Tyler, and Austin. He worked in the Texas Writers-in-the-Schools Programs in San Antonio, Victoria, and Beaumont. He also worked at Paperbacks Plus in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, and ran a creative writing workshop out of the old Lakewood Paperbacks Plus. He has worked for environmentalist causes with Earth First! and the Sierra Club. As a writer he’s open to any subject if it inspires him, but he often writes about working people and about fatherhood. Currently he is working on a memoir about the time he lived in a tent along Barton Creek near Austin to avoid working jobs for pay. During that time he worked one day and lived on forty dollars a week. Since 1973, despite periods of poverty and instability, Taylor has operated Slough Press. On his press he published the first book by former Dallas writer Sheryl St. Germain, and Pat Littledog’s book set in Dallas, Afoot in a Field of Men, later republished by Atlantic Monthly. Currently one of his former students has a book on a New York Times Bestseller List.
Hedwig Gorski is an American poet, scholar, and artist who received awards for media works in poetry and drama. She coined the term “performance poetry” in early 1980 to describe her poems written only for oral performance and recorded performance poems with composed music. The best collected during live radio broadcasts were re-mastered and released on a CD Send in the Clown (2009). She published three books of poetry and released many audio collections including a collector’s edition chapbook with vinyl record titled Polish Gypsy with Ghost. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street (Slough Press) 2007, 2009, is a memoir/archive about her 1978 experimental verse theater in Austin. Her BFA degree from NSCAD, a world famous radical art school in Nova Scotia, is in painting. Her doctorate in creative writing is from University of Louisiana. She received a Louisiana Artist’s Fellowship (2002), and a Fulbright to lecture in Poland (2003). Some of her poems have been translated into Polish and published in Okolica. Excerpts from her 1978 neo-verse drama Booby, Mama! appear Karawane (2009), and the transcript of a television interview with Robert Creeley is in JAST, a Turkish journal. She appeared at the Jozi Spoken Word Festival 2009 in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the U. S. State Dept. A podcast (2009) of audio for “Mexico Solo” is out on IndieRadio. A micro book titled Poetique (2010) features the performance poem text of audio featured on Send in the Clown.
Special Event Paperbacks Plus Dec. 3 7 pm
Corey Marks Farid Matuk
Corey Marks teaches at the University of North Texas and serves, with Bruce Bond, as Poetry Editor of American Literary Review. He is winner the Natalie Ornish prize, Texas Institiute for Letters, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. a National Poetry Series winner for his book, Renunciation and a National Endowment for the Arts recipient.
Farid Matuk is the author of Is it the King? (Effing, 2006). New poems are forthcoming in Typesetter, Barrelhouse, and The Boston Review, among others. His translations of Spanish language poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Bombay Gin and Translation Review. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Sentence, and Cross Cultural Poetics (XCP), among others.
WordSpace/Dallas Slams Features
Hosted by RockBaby
September 17 James “4Real” Walker at Grind Coffee House
James “4Real” Walker has embraced his gifts since adolescence. He is a performance poet, actor, songwriter, rapper, and has grown into an astonishing artist whose words can resurrect the dead in spirit; giving those who witness his gifts, the motivation they need to seek the kingdom of heaven. He has had the opportunity to share his gifts on radio stations and television shows, and has even performed on a national level. Currently he is the president of a Christian ministry called J.U.D.A.H. Outreach (Jesus’ United Disciples At Hand). He is using his gifts in effort to lead souls to Christ, and continues to make a contribution to his community and to the world, by expanding his creativity and encouraging the leaders of J.U.D.A.H. to do likewise.
October 15 at Grinds Coffee Shop: Victory
Victory is a performance poet, writer, singer, artist, graphic designer, stupid romantic, mother, daughter, daydream believer, introvert with severe social anxiety (and yet possessed by a masochistic urge to make a spectacle of herself).
She has been performing poetry on stage and competing in poetry slams since 2001 and has been on several slam teams that have gone to compete in the National Poetry Slam, including the 2004 Dallas Slam Poetry team that took 3rd place nationally.
She currently is the editor, head writer, photographer and oversees layout for two north Texas community newspapers (names withheld to protect the innocent).
Victory is available to perform at birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, Quinceañeras, funerals and office Christmas parties. Probably not the best choice for a wedding. These have been unlucky so far.
Fans, potential employers, former boyfriends, stalkers and other interested parties can contact her at coffeepup@gmail.com. She dares ya.
November 5th LGB at BackBeat Cafe
LGB is a spokenword artist that was born and raised in New Orleans. He burst on the open mic scene in the year 2000 performing at one of New Orleans most historic open mic venues, Ebony Square. As other venues opened up in the New Olreans area such as True Brew Cafe, Rhythmn City and The Hard Rock Cafe, LGB routinely performed at different locations around the city. His hardcore gritty street style with a mixture of comedy and clever metaphors quickly made LGB a household name. He went on to win several talent shows and open mic competitions with in the same year.
In 2001, 2002 and 2003, he was a member of the first ever New Orleans National Slam Team which competed in Seattle, Minnesota, Memphis and Chicago. In 2003, he was ranked 34th in the Nation and helped the slam team rank in the top 10 at the National Poetry Slam. LGB a.k.a. Beezy also was given the nickname Ghetto Poet for his raw, hold no punches, street style poetry.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, he relocated to Dallas Tx. After getting situated in the Dallas area, he graced a few open mic spots before a two year lay off. Beezy then re-emerged on the open mic scene in the summer of 2008 performing at Sankofa’s Arts Cafe, Brooklyn’s Jazz Cafe and many other venues in the Dallas area. Since his return he has won several slams and talent competitions quietly making a name for his self in the DFW. LGB is currently working on his 4th poetry/spokenword cd after recently releasing his 3rd album titled Poetic Thoughts of LGB. He has shared the stage with many of poetry’s powerhouses such as Sunni Patterson and Talaam Acey just to name a few.
December 17 Fluid Imagery at It’s A Grind
Fluid Imagery is a poet, orator, songstress, edifier, spoken word artist mother and realist. It is her belief that words can be used to heal, hurt, soothe, relate, edify and uplift. She uses the gifts that she has been blessed with to bring an awareness of issues that all people face. She believes that life and death lies in the power of the tongue and that you have to speak good things into existence. She also believes that if you dont know the past, it can haunt your present and distort your future. Her style of poetry blends song with prose to tell stories of injustice, love, pain, desires, and life. It has been branded transparent poetry as she often puts a face to the pain people go through but dare not mention. She writes snippets of her life in every piece that is penned. It is her desire to be a blessing to others through poetry, prose and psalms. Fluid Imagery… I speak……… therefore.. .I AM!!!.
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Northwood Literary Festival October 19th
Will Clarke, Rosalyn Story, RockBaby William Virgil Davis
Rosalyn Story is a Dallas resident who has published both fiction and nonfiction, including “And So I Sing: African American Divas of Opera and Concert” (Warner), which was adapted for the PBS program “Aida’s Brothers and Sisters: A History of Blacks in Opera.” Story is also a long-time violinist with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Her first novel, “More Than You Know” (Agate Publishing), earned critical acclaim, and her new novel, “Wading Home” (Agate Publishing) is set in post-Katrina Louisiana.
Rock Baby has appeared twice on HBO’s Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam and has won several local, regional and national performance poetry competitions. He is viewed as a natural performer who also does comedy and theater. He organizes the Dallas Poetry Slam that host local performance poetry competition and coaches a team that competes nationally. He teaches creative writing for after school programs in DISD, RISD and Desoto ISD. He also is an active member on the African American Impact Committee (AAIC).” and WordSpace/Dallas Slams Feature Series.
Will Clarke is an American novelist who is the author of Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles: A Spy Novel (sort of) and The Worthy: A Ghost’s Story.
A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Clarke originally self-published both books via the Internet and independent books stores like Book Soup in Los Angeles, BookPeople in Austin, and Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Clarke’s books eventually became underground hits in the early part of the 2000s. He later republished the books in hardback with Simon & Schuster and sold the movie rights to Hollywood. Both books have been selected as The New York Times Editors’ Choice while Clarke was named the “Hot Pop Prophet” by Rolling Stone magazine in 2006. He is also the author of the controversial essay, ”How to Kill A Boy That Nobody Likes” which was published in the Free Press Anthology, When I Was a Loser: True Stories of (Barely) Surviving High School.
Will Clarke is known for using the supernatural (a psychic dot-com millionaire and the ghost of a dead frat boy) to trick the cynical eye into seeing the madness of the mundane.
William Virgil Davis is an English Prof at Baylor with lots of prize-winning collections of poetry. His latest collection just won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Poetry Collection.
Cliff Notes Prolonged Media
Cliff Notes Prolonged Media is the love child born of 20 plus years of bookselling experience and a lifetime of loving literature local and worldwide, mainstream and underground, shared between husband and wife team, Carlos Salas and Opalina Salas. Carlos is also a member of the WordSpace Board of Directors and serves on the Programming Committee. As spoken word artists, Carlos and Opal have been part of the DFW open mic circuit for over 15 years and have lived in Oak Cliff for just as long. Their unique bookstore is located adjacent The Kessler at 1230 Davis in Oak Cliff . Stay in touch with their Reading Events by joining their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=127632978107 or follow them on Twitter
http://twitter.com/OakCliffNotes
Mad Swirl Open Mic
Mad Swirl continues to do the poetic & musical open mic voodoo that’s what they doo doo every 1st Wednesday of the month at Absinthe Lounge! Hosted Johnny O and MH Clay, callin’ all the mad poets, musicians, singers & performers & a few other miscellaneous mad ones in Absinthe Lounge to come & strut their mad stuff!
Absynthe Lounge-1409 South Lamar Street
Check out the Mad Swirl Website: www.madswirl.com
Mochalux Open Mic
Saturday Night Poetry Readings
MOCHALUX OPEN MIC
spoken word / poetry / music
SATURDAYS at 8:00 pm
Open Mic, hosted by Paul Sexton,
Devorah Titunik, or an occasional
guest host.
*** NO COVER CHARGE ***
Mochalux Coffee & Tea Co.
1101 E. Bardin Rd, Suite 101
Arlington, TX 76018
Phone: 817-468-0488
All poets / spoken word artists and musicians are invited to participate in the open mic.
Listeners are always welcome, too!
Southwest Shootout Regional Poetry Slam
The Southwest Shootout is a regional poetry competition held every year in a different city in the Southwestern United States, ranging from Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Teams of poets compete against each other in a 4 round preliminary bout on June 11th. The top four teams move on to the Final Poetry Slam on the 12th. Over the past 7 years, these teams have consistently placed in the finals at the National Poetry Slam. A number of Russell Simmon’s HBO “Def Poetry Jam” poets will be participating in this competition. This will be the second time in three years for Dallas to host this event. Price: $10 all inclusive ticket for both nights. $7 advanced purchase final ticket for Saturday only, $10 at the door on Final Night.
