Spoken Word Performances

Before the machines started writing back, there was a long decade of rooms. Beirut wine bars and Paris co-ops, a São Paulo festival, San Francisco basements, the small stages of friends’ living rooms when nothing else was open. From 2014 to 2024 I read constantly. I learned how to land a line by losing rooms first.

The four books of poetry I published in that span — Faded Promises, In the Name of Scandal, Flight of the Jaguar, Invasions — were each rehearsed in those rooms before they were printed. The line breaks were chosen by breath, not by margin. The titles were named by the audiences who kept asking after the same lines, night after night.

The pandemic-era poems that became Invasions began as replies to scam texts, performed almost as a stand-up routine between hosts who didn’t know whether to laugh or hold their breath. The migrant pieces that became Borderline were first tested as a one-poem set at small queer-Arab nights in SF. Whatever has since become net art or fine-tuned model or installation, started here. Inside a microphone. Inside a room that had to be earned.

This page collects the lineage rather than the individual nights. The shows are too many to list and the venues too varied to honour individually. The point is the volume. The point is the repetition. The point is the slow process of learning how a poem survives contact with a body and a room and a strangers’ attention.