This reading is a co-presentation with Nuyorican Poets Cafe. It will be held at Nuyorican Poets Cafe (236 East 3rd Street, NY, NY) at 7pm. Tickets are $10. More information available here.
Adeena Karasick & Paul Tran
Adeena Karasick
Adeena Karasick is a poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of 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); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… 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). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Paul Tran
Paul Tran is the 10th ranked slam poet in the world. His Pushcart-nominated work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Offing, The Cortland Review & RHINO, which gave him a 2015 Editor’s Prize. Paul has also received fellowships & residencies from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary, Napa Valley, Home School Miami & The Vermont Studio Center. He’s the first Asian American poet to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam in almost 20 years, placing 9th overall. Paul lives in NYC, where he works at NYU and coaches the Barnard/Columbia slam team.