Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick is a New York–based Canadian poet, performer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, and media artist. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” by Nicole Brossard and noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” by Charles Bernstein. Karasick won a 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award and the 2016 Voce Donna award for her contributions to feminist thinking as well as the 2024 Inaugural Spoken Word Poetry Award from the League of Canadian Poets.

Karasick is the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics, including Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink, 2023); Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (Dialogos/Lavender Ink, 2023); Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Institute of General Semantics, 2022), shortlisted for the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from ICA and winner of the 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form; and Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018). She wrote the film Eicha: The Book of Lumenations (film, NuJu Films, NY, 2023). She also authored the libretto for her spoken word opera, Salomé: Woman of Valor, with the translations Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017) and Salomé Birangona (Boibhashik Prokashoni, Kolkata, 2020).

Karasick teaches literature and critical theory for the humanities and media studies department at Pratt Institute. She is poetry editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, a member of the board of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, and poet laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The Adeena Karasick Archive is established at special collections at Simon Fraser University.