Nina Karacosta is an actor, poet and director, She was born in Athens and has lived in London, New York and currently lives Paris. She has studied physics, as well as theatre in the UK and poetry at the Poetry Project in New York, where she lived for 15 years. She trained in mime, dance, painting and jazz singing in the Martha Graham School. Nina has acted in London, New York City and Greece and she now performs solo theatre pieces in Paris and around France.
Publications and Achievements
Nina’s poetry has appeared in many outlets and journals, including: Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Ditch, Upstairs at Duroc, UpStart, Tears in the Fence, Core, can can, Shearsman.
In 2021, Turas Press published Quarantena, her collection of 50 poems inspired by the experience of living through the first Covid 19 lock-down in Paris.
Her previous publications are
- Previous Vertigos/Vertiges Précédents (released in both English and French)
- KALEIDOgraph (in collaboration with Anamaría Crowe Serrano) published by Corrupt Press.
Nina has been a poetry editor at Upstairs at Duroc, an Anglophone literary magazine based in Paris.
Reviews and Responses
“In Quarantena, Nina Karacosta’s verse journal of fifty days of lockdown in a ‘city of masks’, the poet’s fine perception is directed onto those things we generally
take for granted. Under such close scrutiny the everyday acquires a hallucinatory quality, so that ‘the lamp stalks me in the house’. In the disturbing reality of a city under quarantine, identity tself comes under threat, until we all might ask, with Karacosta, ‘is a clown the face seen or the face hidden?’ ”
David Butler
“Nina Karacosta beautifully records the eeriness of lockdown as experienced in a densely populated district of Paris – the bottomless dive into oneself and the weirder depths of the imagination even as you try to keep your sanity, the importance of the prosaic details that structure and prove the indispensable to survival, the sense of yourself expanding to fill the emptiness of a whole lost world of human activity.”
Anne Ortiz Talvaz
To read a review of Quarantena, head over to our Reviews page.
Check out Nina’s article in writing.ie about the experience of living through the Paris lockdown and the poems inspired by the experience.