Author/artist Warren Lehrer’s solo and collaborative books and multimedia projects form a panoramic and very human chronicle of the American experience, from boardwalks, fast food joints, youth detention centers and mental health wards, to the prismatic personalities of immigrant Queens, NY, and a half century of imaginary books by his literary alter ego Bleu Mobley. We talk with the vis lit pioneer and his most recent collaborator, poet/cultural critic Adeena Karasick about his Whitman-inspired journey and their new book Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings.
For more information about the book launch, which will take place on Friday, October 6th, please check: https://centerforbookarts.org/calendar/book-launch/ouvert-oeuvre-openings
Warren Lehrer is a NY-based writer and designer 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 National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY.
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D is a NY based poet, performer, cultural theorist, media artist and 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), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein). Honors include: 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient; Voce Donna Italia Award for her contributions to feminist thinking; 2023 winner of the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form (MEA); and is Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. Hot of the press is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations and Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, Lavender Ink, 2023.
Judith Sloan is an actor, educator, radio, audio artist, librettist and human rights activist. Her work combines humor pathos and a love of the absurd. In addition to her plays, commentaries, documentaries and collaborative works, as cofounder of the non-profit EarSay, Sloan is the director of a two decade long program in arts education for immigrant teenagers. She is also a faculty member at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and has been awarded multiple commissions and grants form NY State Council on the Arts, NY Foundation for the Arts, Mellon, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She is performing at the end of October at the People’s Voice Cafe in Manhattan.
Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman and is currently completing a biography of the poet.
We look forward to seeing you for the livestream on our YouTube channel on September 21st at 1:30 pm (EST).
