Writer/Performer
Jorah LaFleur
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CelloPoetica is a creative duo project that combines the talents of
spoken word poet Jorah LaFleur
and cellist Nisha Calkins.
Nisha and Jorah share a love of exploratory conversations. As collaborators and friends, they find joy in talking to each other. Onstage, both artists bring decades of individual craft experience and fresh excitement about how to communicate together via their different, uniquely compatible, forms. Each show contains experimental and spontaneous elements. Curiosity sings. At the core, this project is an interplay between an instrument that invokes voice, and a voice attempting to bring musicality to meaning.
● Saturday June 7th, 2025 at Tsunami Books with Mood Area 52
● Saturday July 11th-13th, 2025 at the Oregon Country Fair
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NISHA CALKINS: "My musical background is diverse and grounded in classical training. I began my lifelong love of the cello in 1992, at the age of 10. Since then, I have performed and recorded with a variety of musical artists, poets, storytellers, and dancers. From 2001 to 2002, I studied cello in Germany and went on to university, continuing to grow and develop as a cellist and professional musician. In 2008, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. Before graduating in 2006, I became a founding member of Kef, a prominent East European/Balkan Music Band that tours in the Northwest each year. We released our first album in 2009 and began a brass band in 2012, in which I also play a Euphonium (brass instrument). I first began teaching cello in 2011 and have since continued to discover and expand my love of sharing and teaching the cello to people of many ages and levels, experiencing the joy and fulfillment of my students developing confidence and their self-expression with the cello (for educational and professional purposes, competitions, therapy, healing, fun, and enjoyment).
JORAH LAFLEUR is a writer/performer who has been playing with spoken word poetry all of her adult life. Along the way, she has built related skill sets: emceeing concerts/festivals and variety shows; acting; interviewing; and facilitating workshops. While Jorah enjoys being an entertainer herself, a central theme in her artistic life has been acting as a container builder and advocate for artistic expression in community. For over a decade, she ran the Eugene Poetry Slam, and for the last eight years, she has been working for the small-but-mighty literary nonprofit Wordcrafters in Eugene as a teaching artist and Writers in the Schools Coordinator. Jorah has published two books of poetry, but most of her poems are still shelved only in her memory banks and offered from the stage. Creating and sharing, testifying and witnessing, taking turns being seen and being heard on a mic—Jorah is continually moved by these potent and simple magics. Her current passion is working with writers who want to strengthen their relationship to reading their own work. Jorah was recently voted “Best Poet” in the Eugene Weekly, an honor that has reinforced her commitment to serving her community.
© 2025 Jorah LaFleur