Spoke & Bird

Spoke & Bird returns on THURSDAY 17 SEPTEMBER 2026 with an open mic and two incredible headline acts, CARA OW & CONAN TAN ! Every open micer gets 5 minutes. Email us at [email protected] for a slot. 9 open mic spots up for grabs! OPEN MIC-ERS DO NOT NEED TO BUY TICKETS TO JOIN THE SHOW! Cara is a body most regularly occupied by poetry. Currently unable to fully express themselves in their dying creole mother tongue, Cara’s experimental works resort to a haphazard polylingualism to explore ideas of miscommunication and playful creation. The runner up for the 2021 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry, some of their works can be found in Singapore, UK and US-based publications. More recently, Cara has been making their transition to more live and theatrical mediums. From placing 3rd with their team at the Grand Poetry Tournament, to performing solo spoken word sets at Centre 42, Cara will soon embark on their PhD studies, investigating traditional performing arts. Conan Tan is a Singaporean poet and undergraduate at the University of Oxford. He is the winner of the 2022 National Poetry Competition and a finalist for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and the 2025/26 Magma Poetry Competition. He has received support from various arts organisations including Sing Lit Station, Poetry Translation Centre UK, the Barbican Centre as a Barbican Young Poet, and the Transylvania County Library Foundation as a 2025 Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference Scholar. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Adroit, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and London Writers’ Centre, among others.