Mensen Zeggen Dingen x Writers Unlimited Festival

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Writers Unlimited Festival and Mensen Zeggen Dingen joined forces and words! We brought you a party in GR8 full of poetry, poetry slam, prose and punchlines with a musical note.

Besides Dutch artists - poets Mia You and Maxime Garcia Diaz, and minimalistic electropunk duo Mye-Taai -, three of the festival's international authors let their voices be heard. We listened to Kim Hyesoon, famous South Korean poet, to performance artist and activist Pamela Sneed (USA) and to writer and performer Tyson Hill (Curaçao). Host: Dean Bowen!

Mensen Zeggen Dingen speaks out, raises issues for discussion, and asks questions! For ten years, this platform for poetry, spoken word and performance has been a welcome and regular guest at club shows in venues such as GR8 (The Hague), Theater Bellevue (Amsterdam), Tivoli Vredenburg (Utrecht), Doornroosje (Nijmegen) and festivals such as Lowlands, Down The Rabbit Hole, Zwarte Cross and Writers Unlimited Festival.

Festival tip: after the festival opening at Theater aan het Spui on Thursday night 23 January, we took a 'spoken word walk' (of around 15 minutes) to GR8 to arrive in time for the start of Writers Unlimited Festival x Mensen Zeggen Dingen. On our way there we made a couple of short stops to watch performances.

From 22 to 25 January 2026, Writers Unlimited International Literature Festival The Hague was to be found in theatres, libraries and schools throughout the city: from Theater aan het Spui, Filmhuis Den Haag, GR8 to Theater Dakota, Curaçaohuis, the Laakkwartier, Nieuw Waldeck, Schilderswijk and Ypenburg libraries, the Institute of Social Studies and De Haagse Hogeschool. With over 100 writers, poets, spoken-word artists and musicians from the Netherlands and abroad. With readings, prose, poetry, storytelling, spoken word, author interviews, topical talks, films and music.

Information

Date and time Thursday 22 January 2026 from 21:30 to 23:00 hrs
Location GR8 Theater
Price 12,50

Line-up

Dean Bowen

(The Netherlands, 1984) is a poet, performer and events programmer. As evident in his multilingual poetry collection Bokman (2018), his work looks at the relationship of people's identity to society. A strong performance won him the first Van Dale SPOKEN Award. In 2019 and 2020 he was poet laureate of Rotterdam. Ik vond geen spoken in Achtmaal (I Found No Ghosts in Achtmaal, 2020) describes, via diary entries, poems, confessions, and rituals, the search for what remains of a person long after he has died. He has published poems on the online platforms SampleKanon and Hard//Hoofd and in magazines such as nY and Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen. He teaches performance literature and poetry at the Creative Writing programme at ArtEZ. Together with Flemish writer and musician Joost Hoekaf, he creates introspective hip hop in the Vudu Cru project. His next collection, Masc:r, will be published in January 2026.

Instagram: @dean_bowen
Instagram: @vudu.cru
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Kim Hyesoon

(South Korea, 1955) is one of South Korea's most important contemporary poets. She teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Kim published her first poems in 1979 and was one of the first women to have her work included in the literary magazine Munhak kwa jisŏng (Literature and Intellect), which led the resistance against the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, her work has gained increasing recognition and she has received numerous awards. In her experimental work, she explores the complex existence of women who are grandmothers, mothers and daughters in the context of Korea's highly patriarchal society. Many of Kim Hyesoon's poems have been translated from Korean into English by the Korean-American poet Don Mee Choi, including Kim's books Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), I'm OK, I'm Pig! (2014), Autobiography of Death (2018), Phantom Pain Wings (2019), If the Earth Dies, Whom Will the Moon Circle? (2022) and Synchronized Sea Anemone (2025).
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Go to the website of Kim Hyesoon
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Don Mee Choi

(South Korea) is a poet and translator. She was born in Seoul, educated in the United States, and now lives in Berlin. Choi's works of documentary poetry draw on family history as well as archival material to interrogate "the overlapping histories of Korea and the U.S." In addition to her own poetry, she is a prolific translator to English of modern Korean women poets, including several books by Kim Hyesoon. Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (2010), Petite Manifesto (2014), Hardly War (2016), DMZ Colony (2020), which won the National Book Award, and Mirror Nation (2024). In it, a Mercedes wheel rim rolling down the street evokes memories of her father on the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam. This memory, in turn, becomes a catalyst for delving into the violent, colonial and neo-colonial history of South Korea.

Go to website Don Mee Choi
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Pamela Sneed

(USA) is a New York City-based poet, performer, visual artist, and educator. She is the author of Sweet Dreams (2018), KONG and Other Works (2009) and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (1998). Her memoir Funeral Diva (2020), a poetry and prose book, documents growing up in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and focuses specifically on the experiences of Black queer women. Sneed has toured poetry and performance works domestically and abroad. Her recent show, A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton, premiered in 2024 at the Torpedo Theater in Amsterdam. Written and conceived by Sneed, it is a cabaret performance dedicated to the unsung Black woman founder of rock and roll. With a band, music and monologue Sneed sings, speaks and celebrates aspects of Willie Mae Thornton’s life. She won a 2023 Creative Capital award in literature as well as a 2024 NYSCA grant in poetry. Her visual work has appeared in group shows at the Ford Foundation, Company Gallery, and more.

Instagram: @pamela.sneed
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Tyson Hill

(Curaçao) is a writer and performer. In September 2025, Tyson presented his first poetry collection, Sigá ku glas di awa (Cigar with a glass of water), during the Wintertuin Curaçao Festival. He grew up with a love of reading and writing. After studying in the Netherlands, he returned to Curaçao and rediscovered his passion for literature in his native language, Papiamentu. Creative writing helped him to shape his identity. In this bilingual collection, written in Papiamentu and translated into Dutch by Nathania Engelhardt, Hill takes the reader on a journey through childhood, love, memory and Curaçaoan identity.

Instagram: @tej.hill
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Mia You

(South Korea, 1980) is a poet, translator of Korean poetry and film scripts, and lecturer at the Department of English at Utrecht University. She grew up in the United States and lives in Utrecht. Motherhood, birth, heredity, and the racialization of everyday life form the common thread in her balanced lyrical work. She is the author of the (English-language) poetry collection I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and has published in De Gids, Artforum, Boston Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. In 2024, her second poetry collection, Festival, was published in English by Belladonna Press and in Dutch by Uitgeverij Chaos. She works on the translation of Kim Hyesoon's poetry collection Synchronized Sea Anemone (2025).

Instagram: @quelpart
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Maxime Garcia Diaz

(The Netherlands, 1993) writes poetry and prose in Dutch and English. She studied at the University of Amsterdam and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut collection Het is warm in de hivemind (It's warm in the hivemind) was published in 2021 and was awarded the C. Buddingh' Prize for best poetry debut in 2022. In November 2025, her second poetry collection was published in both Dutch and English by De Bezige Bij: Het netwerk moet gebouwd worden and The network must be built.

Go to website Maxim Garcia Diaz
Instagram @maximgarciadiaz
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Mye_Taai

are a rave club punk duo+1. The work of interdisciplinary artist collective Mye_Taai moves between electronic sound, performance and visual art. Observations of real talk with bits of their own. Empowered by stories, told through grim basement rave club tunes. Join the queue of the “Rave Club For Two" and try to get in there. Have a right laugh together or go home.

Go the website of Mye_Taai here
Instagram: @mye_taai
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