Adeena Karasick & Warren Lehrer Book Celebration!
Karasick and Lehrer will present a multimedia performance/reading with selections from each of their new and recent works, culminating in their award-winning first collaboration. Book signing and reception to follow.
Books will be on sale.
RSVP for free
or make a contribution ($13 suggested) to support Torn Page
Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, and cultural theorist and the author of 14 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), and “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth” (Craig Dworkin). Her writing is acclaimed for its “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory.” Among countless honors, she’s an Andrew Mellon Foundation Award recipient, the 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award recipient for Outstanding Scholarship from the Media Ecology Association, and the winner of the Voce Donna Italia Award for her contributions to feminist thinking. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory at Pratt Institute and is currently the Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Warren Lehrer is a New York-based writer and artist known internationally as a "pioneer of visual literature and design authorship." His solo and collaborative books and multimedia projects explore the vagaries and luminescence of character, the relationships between social structures and the individual, and the pathos and absurdity of life. Honors include: Ladislav Sutnar Lifetime Achievement Prize, Center for Book Arts Honoree, the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, the International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, and fellowships and grants from the NEA, NYFA, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. The author/co-author of 12 books, Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. “In Lehrer’s books, words take on thought’s very form, bringing sensory experience to the reader as directly as ink on paper can allow.” The New York Times Book Review
Praise for Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings
“An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page…”
Starred Kirkus Review
“A vivid new graphic-text collaboration… Distinctly shaped, strikingly formed, Ouvert Oeuvre:
Openings is a vibrant and attractive book, handled with suppleness.”
Johanna Drucker JD: ABCs Newsletter
“Like nothing I’ve seen in recent memory… It’s not ‘experimental’ — it’s 21st-century realism. It’s how information flows… A joyful meditation on our post-everything world.”
Bill Lessard Heavy Feather Review
“A swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and type…”
Steven Heller Print Magazine
“A striking publication that demonstrates the crafting of a sensory experience that will interest anyone with an appetite for linguistic and typographic experimentation..."
Amy Henry Eye Magazine
“Recommended for all poetry lovers… Transformative and deeply rewarding.”
Ruchi Agarwal Pegasus Literary
“A total work of art, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings combines poetry, typographic design, and music as a single unit…
Tom Bowden Book Beat
“A true masterpiece of linguistic play and exploration!”
Paolo Granata, Professor, Book and Media Studies, University of Toronto