André Préfontaine

André Préfontaine is a seven-time national Slam Poetry Champion. He holds the “Triple Crown” achievement having won The Underground Championship, The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, and The Individual Championship at the Verses Festival of Words. Alongside those victories he’s won The Haiku Death Match, O.G500 Slam put on by HipHop Canada, the Slamtario regional championship, and represented Canada at the Coupe Du Monde (World Cup of Poetry) in Paris, France, where he placed fourth.

His current work is a semi-autobiographical retelling of “The Great Pagliacci” joke. After years of using humor to deflect from his experiences with psychosis, depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress, André is caustic, isolated, and suicidal as he suddenly comes face-to-face with a Nihilism that demands to know “what’s the point?” Tasked with the urgency to reconcile that he cannot just make jokes, but must relive the harrowing instances he so desperately wishes to avoid in order to heal his wounds should he wish to survive.

With vulnerable introspection he turns his Kafkaesque inner-world outward for the world to see. The end result is a journey through which unhealed hurt and disappointments are dissected with gallows humor and remedied once he realizes the statement he must answer isn’t “what’s the point?” but “what’s the punchline?”

As part of his public programming, André will participate in an open mic session with Tri-Cities Poetry on October 15, 2024.