Players Pub Spoken Word Series

Players Pub Spoken Word Series
Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington

Featuring Gilbert Ndahayo (poetry), Hiromi Yoshida (poetry), T.K. Williams (poetry)
with music by Sitar Outreach Ministry (psychedelic sitar)

$5

There will also be an open mic.

GILBERT NDAHAYO is an African Movie Academy Award® nominated film director and two-times winner of the Best Documentary Feature at Silicon Valley African Film Festival for “The Rwandan Night” (2013) and “Rwanda: Beyond the Deadly Pit” (2010). His 32-minutes first fiction film “Scars of my Days” – a morality tale and visceral cinematic experience of “Sin City” set in Africa – aired on French television TV5 Monde and premiered at the 2007 New York’s TriBeCa Film Festival film in the presence of the former US President Bill Clinton. Ndahayo was born in 1975 in the Mishahi forest, a traditional village of Astrida (Southern Province), and raised into an Abatsobe family – the royal ritualist – as one of the last great grand-sons of Umwami (King) of Rwanda. With the outbreak of the Tutsi genocide, Ndahayo alongside with other twenty-seven young boys were hiding at CND’s bunker, guarded by the Inkotanyi’s Rukaga – six hundred soldiers of the RPF’s third battalion. His parents, grandparents and fifty-two members of his immediate family were massacred. Ndahayo’s debut Kinyarwanda poetry collections “Vida and Me-n”, “Ndabaga – the Archangel-e” and “Slayers and the Bird” were performed in the Spring of 2005 before an audience of eleven thousand people at Amahoro stadium in the capital city of Rwanda. Ndahayo holds Master’s degree in Fine Arts in Film from Columbia University in New York City and currently lives in Bloomington working on his first novel.

HIROMI YOSHIDA is a winner of multiple Indiana University Writers’ Conference awards. Her poems have been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals that include Indiana Voice Journal, Flying Island, The Asian American Literary Review, and The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. An active member of the Beat Generation and Daily Haiku Facebook Groups, Hiromi’s status updates frequently assume haiku form.

From and made of parts unknown, TK WILLIAMS graduated from the University of Evansville with a BFA in poetry in 2008. Their work has been published in the journals Outrageous Fortune, Bad Pony and Inflection: A Collection of New Poetry, as well as several poetry zines and, soon, a Carly Rae Jepsen fanbook. TK’s work as of late has focused on exploring transgender and disabled identities, with the occasional dip into professional wrestling as an expression of love. Don’t tell their professors that last part.

In the hazy basements of local analog havens, an audio experience has been blooming at a remarkably organic rate. SITAR OUTREACH MINISTRY, comprised of a sitar, electric guitar, and numerous unique instruments, has been planting the seeds of meditative grooves for many years in the Bloomington scene and impact listeners new and old.