Adeena Karasick is a New York based, Canadian poet, cultural theorist, media ecologist and author of eight books of poetry and poetics; a multimedia arts practitioner with work that includes videopoems, live and recorded pechakucha regularly screened at festivals, conferences, classrooms and screens worldwide. Born in 1965, in Winnipeg Manitoba, to Russian immigrant parents, she became dedicated to the play of language as a powerful tool for transformation and change.

 

Writing at the intersection of Conceptualism and neo-Fluxus performatics, her urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard) and noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature “syllabic labyrinth” (Craig Dworkin). Most recently is Salomé: Woman of Valor which was translated into Italian (Pina Piccoli and Serena Piccolo), published in dual edition from the University of Padua Press, Padova, 2017 and translated into Bengali: (trans. Aritra Sanyal and Paulami Sengupta), Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020. And hot off the press is, is Ærotomania Flight Deck, NuJu Books, New York, 2023, Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, and Ouvert: Oeuvre: Openings, Lavender Ink Press, New Orleans, 2023.

 

Karasick grew up in Vancouver, BC where she studied with Warren Tallman at UBC received her BA in English (1988) and moved to Toronto to work, study and perform with poets, bill bissett and bpNichol. Receiving her MA from York University (1991), and a Ph.D in Kabbalah and Deconstruction at Concordia University (Montreal), and enjoyed a close friendship with Jacques Derrida for the 10 years prior to his death. Her doctoral dissertation, “Of Poetik Thinking: A ‘Pataphysical Investigation of Cixous, Derrida and the Kabbalah” established her as a foremost Kabbalah scholar, recently cited as the “Kabbalah Kohenet (High Priestess), morah (teacher) and scholar” (Stephen Pickering, Kabbalah Fractals Project).

 

Karasick went on to publish 10 books that incorporate these teachings and a love of language, and has been the generous recipient of numerous awards and grants including Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Professional Writers (2016, 2010), Canada Council for the Arts, Spoken Word and Storytelling Program Award (2010, 2008, 1999), Canada Council for the Arts Travel Awards (2011, 2009, 2008, 2003, 2002), Canadian External Affairs Award (1998, 1997, 1994, 1993, 1992), Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Award, for Amuse Bouche (2006), for The House That Hijack Built, (2005, 2004), Best Book of  2012, Daily Forward for This Poem (2012), Best Book of 2009 for Amuse Bouche (AboutBooks.com), Exuberance is Beauty Book Award for Amuse Bouche, 2009, ReLit Award for Dyssemia Sleaze, 2000,  Bumbershoot Book Fair Award, "Most Adventurous Publication" for Dyssemia Sleaze, 2000, British Columbia Book Award (Silver) for Mêmewars (1994), and in 2008, at Book Expo America, received the MPS Mobile Award (For being the World’s First “Mobile Poet”), whereby her work was made available on over 4 billion mobile devices (cell phones and Smart Phones including the iPhone, all Blackberry, Android and Symbian devices) throughout the world, 2008.

 

For the past 20 years she has taught at a number of American and European Institutions, including Fordham University, St. John’s University, and at the Gutenberg Universität Mainz as “The Mainz Scholar”. She is presently Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in New York (teaching Poetry Poetics and Performance for the Dept. of Humanities and Media Studies) and is the Poetry Coordinator for Klezkanada Poetry Retreat, International Festival for Language, Music and Culture, held in the Laurentian Mountains.

 

Her books have been received as both poetry and hybrid-genre essays on writing and interpretive technologies, and have been adopted in both English and Media Studies Departments, including University of Minnesota, University of Pennsylvania, Simon Fraser University, McGill University, the Ontario College of Art and Design, Rutgers University, The Gutenberg Universität Mainz, University of Jaipur, University of Delhi, The Center of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Bologna, and Bath Spa University in the UK. In them, she brings an urban, feminist aesthetic, infused with a collage of academic and pop cultural idioms to bear on the process of writing as a radical grafting of links and perversions conjugated at the threshold of dissociation, questioning many consumerist assumptions about language and normative procedures of meaning production.

 

Karasick’s work has been featured in a wide variety of national and international journals, anthologies and blog sites, has been the subject of over 80 interviews (on television, radio and in print) and “inserts itself amongst the corpus of texts that are changing, and being changed by, contemporary pedagogies” (Canadian Literature). Her Spoken-Word opera, Salomé: Woman of Valor, which re-visions the apocryphal figure of Salomé through a feminist Jewish lens, incorporates, poetry, history, theory, visual projections, live music drawing from Klezmer bhangra and jazz traditions (composed by Sir Frank London), and modern dance (under the choreographic direction of Gus Solomons Jr.), has been the subject of many thrilling reviews -- and  after a series of wildly receptive sold out preview presentations (at The Tribeca New Music Festival, DROM, Pratt Institute and at The Stone), will debut in Canada at the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver, Spring 2018 and at Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto, Summer 2018.

 

Stemming from an ethnic heritage of nomadicism, exile, and infusion, Karasick remains dedicated to extending the notion of the book – whether through hybrid-style essays which include full-color mash-ups and collage, a variety of typefaces and multiple covers, or through new technologies which combine, multi-media, enriched graphics; or text based performances, incorporating visual projections and electronic music; exploring ways language, as both a physical and material object and as medium of transference can be brought into a public space highlighting interactive creativity. In this last year alone, she has given over 40 public lectures and performances, including throughout Canada, US, Italy, Morocco and India – (at Simon Fraser University at the Bennet Library, Special Collections, to celebrate the acquisition of her archive, with a full display of the 27 boxes of materials. The libretto for Salomé was translated into Italian, and published by the University of Padua Press and toured extensively: Padova, Cesena, Venice: at the Poetry and Sister Arts International Festival / Festival internazionalee di poesia e arti sorelle, Cesena FC, Italia, 31 03 17 at the Awards Ceremony Poetry Reading and Best Literary Criticism Award ceremony (LILEC – Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, University of Bologna, 30 03 17 at the Museo Ebraico di Padua / Jewish Museum of Padova, 29 03 17 at the Museo Ebraico di Venezia / Jewish Museum of Venice, Campo di Ghetto Novo in Venice, and 27 03 17 at the Centro di Poesia Contemporanea dell'Università di Bologna / Verse 61,in  Bologna, Italy; in New York at The Players Club for The Institute of General Semantics and Media Ecology Association, and at Jingle Belles / Local Knowledge Party, Swift Hibernian Lounge; in Marrakech at the Festival of the Prose Poem, Al Hamra Center for Culture and Thought. Marrakesh, Morocco; at the DIGITAL EngAGEment conference at Brooklyn College hosted by the Dept. of Radio and Television in May 2017; at the Subterranean 27th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival, The Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale NY; KlezKanada Festival of Jewish Music and Culture in Lantier Quebec, the 2017 Boston Poetry Marathon, in Cambridge, Mass and in India at the National Academy of Letters at Sahitya Akademi Conference Hall, University of New Delhi; at Jadavpur University as part of Forum on Identity, Border and Nation, Prayukti Bhawan in Jadavpur, Kolkata; the Lions Club Auditorium, Deshopriya Park, Kolkata, India and Kolkata Nandan, West Bengal Film Center, for Baschimbanga Kobita Akademi sponsored by the Government of West Bengal, Kolkata, in honor of her contributions to Post-Colonial Literature.

 

Karasick’s cross-genre performances, books, videos, pechakuchas have established her as a powerful force in Canadian and American Literature. According to Book Expo America, recognizing her as being “the future of E-Books.” (Kathleen Sweeney); she [is] opening up the possibilities for re-visioning language as a performance, as theatre, and how that language, with all its power and sublimity, its (in)finite permutation and combination, is inseparable from our lives.