Mel Moya

Mel Moya is a slam artist from Seraing in the Liège region. She performs on international stages, both with music and a cappella. She won the Paroles Urbaines and Borderlines - Euregion Poetry Slam literary awards in 2021. Words, poetry, and books have attracted her since her early childhood. Even though books and magazines did not exist in the family home, she spent most of her time in the local library or in her room, imitating her favorite artists. Slam appeared almost by accident, one night in October 2018, when La Zone, a pillar of the Liège Slam scene, offered an open mic. She declaimed a text for the first time, with a trembling voice and crumpled paper. The rage to speak. The urgency to speak. Galvanized by this first experience, she fell in love with slam: she took to open stages in Belgium, France, Switzerland, where she revealed her texts, refined in the privacy of her notebooks.

With Mater Dolorosa, published by l’Arbre de Diane, Mel signs a slam collection whose texts, both introspective and vivid, draw from some of her most painful childhood memories, not with a fatalistic view, but illuminated by a radiant resilience. She sometimes questions the place of women in Mediterranean households, sometimes the values of one country in another. When cultural baggage migrates, what happens to our anger?