Poetry in Times Square with Adeena Karasick

A poetry reading from Adeena Karasick.

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a NY based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 18 books of award-winning poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), 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); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work” (Mark Scroggins), “informed by a ferocious and acute rigor.” (Barrett Watten). Honors include: 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form (MEA), Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA); 2023 Inaugural League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award; Canada Council for the Arts Creation Award (2025) for Star/Crossed: The Judia of Toledo and the King of Castille); 3-time recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award and the Voce Donna Italia Award for contributions to feminist thinking. Dr. Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor of Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate editor 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, Simon Fraser University.

‍