Verbose at The King’s Arms

Now in its ninth year, award-winning Verbose is one of Manchester’s longest-running monthly spoken word and live literature events, featuring an open mic plus two guest performers – this month Abi Hynes and Kayla Feldman.

Both headliners have theatremaking backgrounds, which is apt as this instalment of Verbose is part of the mini Fringe Highlights Festival at The King’s Arms, running throughout January and also featuring one-person shows by current host Ilaria Robinson-Passeri and former host Adam Evans.

A little more on January’s headliners…

Abi Hynes is an award-winning drama and fiction writer based in Manchester. She wrote the first four episodes of historical audio drama Dark Harbour for Audible, and is currently developing many original dramas for TV. Her script Long Lost was on the Brit List in 2022, and she has recently adapted Anne of Green Gables for audio drama for Audible, starring Catherine O’Hara and Victor Garber, and narrated by Sandra Oh.

As a playwright, her work has been staged in theatres across the UK, and she works regularly with LGBT History Month, bringing forgotten queer stories to life on stage. Her short stories have appeared in a wide variety of journals, magazines and anthologies, and she won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020.

She’ll be reading from her debut short story collection, Monstrous Longing, which was published by Dahlia Books in October 2023. Contemporary fictions of a feminist speculative lilt, they explore themes of love, hunger and obsession, and are described as “poignant, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny tales of human relationships and desires that view the world at a slant, or take the reader to worlds that are not quite like our own”.

Kayla Feldman is a freelance director and writer for the page, stage and screen. As Kayla Martell Feldman, she has performed poetry across London and elsewhere, and co-hosts the Process spoken word open mic night with Tyrone Lewis. Her work has been widely published across the UK and North America, and been featured on the Dead Darlings and Artists That Work podcasts.

In 2022, she won second place in the Crossing the Tees short story competition. She is a three-time Genesis Poetry Slam Winner and has had work commissioned by JW3, Canada Water Theatre, Watch Your Mouth, Vashti Media, and The Narcissist Cookbook. In 2020, she took part in the invite-only Roundhouse Poetry Weekender led by Bridget Minamore and Cecilia Knapp.

In 2021, she self-published her debut poetry collection, Tikva, and her second collection is out now from Verve Poetry Press. You can also catch her at A Lovely Word in Liverpool, on 1 February.

Ilaria, with co-hosts Lisa O’Hare (see this month’s Word Central) and Alicia Fitton, has been carefully curating and shepherding headliners plus various open mic performers on the fourth Monday of each month for a year now, and you can expect poetry, prose, play snippets and everything in between. If you’d like to read on the open mic, get in touch with Verbose direct to put your name on the list (or waiting list).