Adeena Karasick, Ph.D. is a New York based Canadian poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of several books of poetry and poetic theory, Salome, Woman of Valor (GapRiot Press, 2018), Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), This Poem (Talonbooks, 2012), Amuse Bouche: Tasty Treats for the Mouth (Talonbooks 2009), The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004, The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001), Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996), Prairis/cite Maintenance (Wave7press, 1995) Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks, 1992). Her work also includes parodic videopoems.
Karasick was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Russian immigrant parents and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied with Warren Tallman at the University of British Columbia and received her BA in English (1988) before moving to Toronto to work, study and perform with poets bill bissett and bpNichol. She received her MA from York University (1991), and a Ph.D in Kabbalah and Deconstruction at Concordia University (1997).
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.
Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production, and engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. Karasick has lectured and performed worldwide and regularly publishes articles, reviews and dialogues on contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural/semiotic theory.