An open mic night at The Hood featuring writers working in the spirit of James Baldwin.

More information from Facebook event below:

Free tickets! Reservations recommended! Email info@lamaisonbaldwin.fr to reserve a table.

Sign-up for 5 minutes onstage begins at 7pm; mic opens at 7:30

Join us at The Hood Paris Coffeehouse and Bistro in the heart of Belleville for an open mic themed for the resistance! Bring your poetry, prose, comedy and music to the stage. Hear spoken word performance inspired by James Baldwin and writers telling the truth about the perilous times in which we’re living. Featuring as special guests the inaugural writers-in-residence at La Maison Baldwin, a new residency program for writers working in the spirit of James Baldwin: Fatin Abbas Evan Andrew Starling and Jamie McGhee

FATIN ABBAS’ first novel, The Interventionists, is forthcoming from W.W.Norton & Co. Her short fiction has appeared in Freeman’s:TheBest New Writing on Arrival, The Warwick Review, and Friction. She is a recipient of the Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship, and has been awarded residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Villa Sarkia (Finland), ArcArtist Residency (Switzerland), and an Alumni Award granted by the Iceland Writers Retreat. Born in Sudan and raised in NewYork, she gained her BA from Cambridge (UK), her PhD from Harvard, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, where she was awarded both the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize and the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award.

NewYork-based Afro-surrealist EVAN STARLING-DAVIS is a literary artist, curator, and playwright. His notable projects include his cinematic short, BLISS, toured nationally via Black Radical Imagination; a Syracuse Stage commissioned play Airborn; and the co-creation of the Afro-queer webseries, Monogamish. Currently, Evan is an M.A. Candidate of Museum Studies at Syracuse University, where he was additionally recognized as the inaugural Writing Our Lives Fellow via the Department of Reading and Language Arts; devising and facilitating literary and art spaces for underrepresented voices withincommunities of the Rust Belt region.

JAMIE MCGHEE is a writer whose work explores how blackness is constructed, deconstructed and policed around the world. After writing for Issa Rae Productions,she co-authored a project on James Baldwin with Duke professor Dr. Adam Hollowell. Her first book, a biography of Venus and Serena Williams, is forthcoming with Macmillan. She’s currently working on a novel about the dispossession of the Cherokee Freedmen.