Electronic Literature Organization

Sandy Baldwin

Sandy Baldwin is an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University. As coordinator of the Center for Literary Computing, he facilitates interdisciplinary research projects in the poetics of new media and the media ecology of literary institutions, using web-technologies, multimedia, hypertext, audio/video, and virtual environments. Sandy’s scholarly work explores media technologies as rhetorical and aesthetic objects, asking how media structure our thought and experience. His particular focus is on continuities and borrowings between literary theory and theories of digital multimedia. Current research areas include: net art as a literary genre, avant-garde writing as a precursor of multimedia, the narrativity of computer games, and the cultural implications of nanotechnology.

Jeff Ballowe

Before leaving Ziff Davis at the end of 1998, Jeff Ballowe was president of Ziff-Davis Interactive Media. During his career at ZD, Ballowe led the launches of 5 magazines, ZDNet on the Web, ZDTV (became TechTV), and the initial ZD/Softbank investments in Yahoo!, Inc. Currently he serves as a director of Onvia and is on the advisory boards of a few technology start-ups. He is the co-founder and past President of the not-for-profit Electronic Literature Organization and a former member of the Board of Trustees of Lawrence University. He has an MBA from the University of Chicago, an MA in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from Lawrence University.

Neil Fraistat

Neil Fraistat, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He currently serves as the Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). He has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in such journals as PMLA, JEGP, Studies in Romanticism, Text, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, as well as in such books as The Poem and the Book, Poems in Their Place, and The “Prometheus Unbound” Notebooks. A founder and general editor of the Romantic Circles Website, he is the coeditor of Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print; The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols. to date); the Norton Critical edition, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose; and an edition of Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France. He currently serves on the boards of Literary & Linguistic Computing, Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), Brown’s Women Writers Project, Studies in Romanticism, The Keats-Shelley Journal, Romanticism on the Net, and the Dickinson Electronic Archive. He has been awarded the Society for Textual Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the Keats-Shelley Association Prize, an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize, and the Keats-Shelley Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award. Fraistat is an ex-officio member of the ELO board of directors.

Jo-Anne Green

Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA). Born in Johannesburg, South Africa she graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 with a BFA Honours in Printmaking and a major in Art History. She emigrated to Boston in 1983 where she later obtained her MFA in Painting. In 1985, Green co-founded Cultural Resistance to educate the American public about apartheid through the art and culture of South Africa. Until 1991, the organization curated multiple exhibitions, organized video screenings and performances, and published a monthly newspaper. Prior to joining NRPA in March 2002, Green was instrumental in starting the artist-in-residence program at the University of New Mexico’s (UNM) Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center; this initiative led to the creation of the Arts Technology Center (ATC). Green served as program coordinator for both the ATC and the Arts of the Americas Institute at UNM for two years before returning to Boston in 2001. She earned a MS in Arts Administration from Lesley University in 2003. Green has exhibited her paintings, one-of-a-kind artist’s books, and installations in South Africa, Boston, and New York.

Dene Grigar

ELO Treasurer
Dene Grigar is a media artist-scholar and Director of the Digital Technology and Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. Her books include New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways in and Around Electronic Environments (with John Barber) and Defiance and Decorum: Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism (with Laura Gray and Katherine Robinson); media art works include “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project,” both of which appeared in Iowa Review Web in October 2004, and When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce narrative. The video of the piece has been named Finalist in the Drunken Boat Panliterary Award Competition and was exhibited at Art Tech Media 06 in Spain. Her most recent work, also with Gibson, is the MINDful Play Environment, a live, interactive game environment she is developing (with Gibson) for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. She is also Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and International Editor for Computers and Composition.

Robert Kendall

Robert Kendall is the author of the book-length hypertext poem A Life Set for Two (Eastgate Systems) and other hypertext poetry published on the Web. His electronic poetry has been exhibited at many venues in the United States and abroad, and he has given interactive readings of his work in many cities. His printed book of poetry, A Wandering City, was awarded the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and he has received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, a New Forms Regional Grant, and other awards. He teaches hypertext poetry and fiction for the New School University’s online program, runs the literary Web site Word Circuits and is co-developer of the Word Circuits Connection Muse, a hypertext tool for poets and fiction writers.

Matthew Kirschenbaum

Matthew Kirschenbaum is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in digital studies, applied humanities computing, images and visual culture, and postmoder/experimental literature. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and was trained in humaities computing at Virginia’s Electronic Text Center and Institure for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. His dissertation was entitled “Lines for a Virtual T[y/o]porography: Electronic Essays on Artifice and Information” (1999). Written and presented entirely online, it was the first electroninc dissertation in the English department at Virginia (and one of the first in the nation). Kirschenbaum’s current book project is Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality, .under contract to the MIT Press and planned for Fall 2006. Kirschenbaum is also a consultant to the William Blake Archive, and is at work on an open source software tool entitled The Virtual Lightbox. He sits on the Executive Counsel of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and serves as a Commisioning Editor for Computers and the Humanities, as well as on the editoirial boards of Postmodern Culture and Text Technology. For additional projects and activities, see his vita. Kirschenbaum was assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky for two years before moving to Maryland.

Marjorie C. Luesebrink

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink writes hypermedia fiction as M.D. Coverley. Her full-length interactive, electronic novel, Califia, is available on CD-ROM from Eastgate Systems. Her most recent work, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day was published in 2006. It is available on her website. Coverley’s Web short stories and essays have appeared in The Iowa Review Web, BeeHive, Artifacts, Cauldron & Net, The Blue Moon Review, Riding the Meridian, Salt Hill, New River, Currents in Electronic Literacy, Bunk, Poems That Go, Enterzone, The Salt River Review, Aileron, Blast 5 (Alt X Publications), Room Without Walls, and frAme. M.D. Coverley/Luesebrink is the Hypermedia Editor for The Blue Moon Review and an Associate Editor for Word Circuits and Inflect. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, and has served as its President.

Mark C. Marino

ELO Secretary

Mark C. Marino is an author and critic, working on chatbots and other new media. His writings include Stravinsky’s Muse, Labyrinth, 12 Easy Lessons To Better Time Travel (PC, MAC). He blogs about elit on Writer Response Theory and Critical Code Studies. He is also the editor of Bunk Magazine, an online new media humor magazine. His works-in-progress include the adaptive hypertext novel “a show of hands” (using the Literatronica system) and his web-annotation metafiction, “Marginalia in the Library of Babel.” Excerpted adaptations of these works are forthcoming work in New River and Hyperrhizome.

Marino teaches writing at the University of Southern California. He has recently been exploring techniques for using Web 2.0 technologies in the writing classroom, where he also uses his 22 Short Films about Grammar. He is also a co-founde of the Southern California Institute for Writing Technology Education (SCIWRITER) In addition to his creative works, Mark has forthcoming critical works in the James Joyce Quarterly and Explorations. (His complete portfolio can be found here.)

Mark has assumed the duties of Director of Communication and Secretary, promoting the latest endeavors of ELO. For press inquiries or ELO publicity, please contact him at mark + c + marino {at} g + mail dotted com.

Talan Memmott

Talan Memmott is a hypermedia artist/writer from San Francisco, California. He is the creative director and editor of the online hypermedia literary journal BeeHive. Memmott is author of numerous Web works of electronic literature. He winner of the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award in 2001 for his Lexia to Perplexia.

Nick Montfort

ELO Vice-President
Nick Montfort, an electronic literature author, critic, and theorist, is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (The MIT Press, 2003) and coeditor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of The New Media Reader (The MIT Press, 2003). Montfort has written and programmed interactive fiction, including Book and Volume. He and William Gillespie wrote The Ed Report and 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002). Montfort wrote the sticker novel Implementation with Scott Rettberg. He blogs at Grand Text Auto.

Stuart Moulthrop

Stuart Moulthrop is an acclaimed author and critic, best known for his “Victory Garden” and “Reagan Library,” which appeared in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. More recently, Moulthrop has been awarded the international Vinaros Prize for 2007 in two categories: “Deep Surface” in the Narrative category and “Under Language” in Poetry.

In accordance with competition rules, neither work has been published yet. “Deep Surface” began its descent at Brown last March. A late beta of “Under Language” made its debut in Bergen last August. Both pieces can be played at Stuart’s new Web home, most of which is still under construction.

His portfolio of literary work is now www.smoulthrop.com/lit. (Non-literary and scholarly pieces remain on the IAT server at University of Baltimore.) Moultrhop currently teaches at University of Balitmore in the School of Information Arts and Technology.

Rita Raley

Rita Raley researches and teaches in the areas of the digital humanities and 20-21C literature in an “international” or “global” context. Her book, Tactical Media, a study of new media art in relation to neo-liberal globalization, is under contract and forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in its “Electronic Mediations” series. She also continues work on Global English and the Academy, excerpts of which have been published in The Yale Journal of Criticism and Diaspora. Another book project, Reading Code, is underway, an excerpt of which is forthcoming under the title, “Code.surface || Code.depth” (see a related graduate seminar here). She has also published articles on electronic literature in Postmodern Culture, Electronic Book Review, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. In the English department at UCSB, she is affiliated with the Literature and Culture of Information specialization and the Transcriptions project and is currently leading a working group on “New Reading Interfaces” for Transliteracies. She has taught at the University of Minnesota and at Rice University, where she was the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Assistant Professor of English.

Scott Rettberg

Scott Rettberg is Associate Professor of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen. Rettberg is the cofounder of ELO and served as the organization’s first executive director from 1999-2001. He is the coauthor of The Unknown, a Hypertext Novel (1998-2001) and The Unknown, an Anthology (2002), and the author of Kind of Blue (2003), a serial novel for email. Rettberg has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, an M.A. in Fiction Writing from Illinois State University and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Coe College. He blogs at Grand Text Auto.

Stephanie Strickland

Stephanie Strickland is a print and new media poet. Her fifth book of poems, Zone: Zero, is forthcoming in 2008. It includes two poems which serve as scores for digital works, Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot and slippingglimpse. A double book of poems from Penguin, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, has a web component, Vniverse. Strickland’s essays about electronic literature appear in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, ebr, Isotope, and volumes from MIT Press and Intellect Press (England). A director of the Electronic Literature Organization, she edited the first (2006) volume of the Electronic Literature Collection with Kate Hayles, Nick Montfort, and Scott Rettberg. She has taught hypermedia literature as part of experimental poetry at many colleges and universities.

Thom Swiss

Thom Swiss is a Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa and the editor of a journal for digital and experimental writing and The Iowa Review Web. His books include Unspun (NYU Press), an edited volume that explores concepts that help shape our understanding of the World Wide Web and its wide-ranging influence on contemporary culture, Magic, Metaphor and Power: Cultural Theory and the World Wide Web (Routledge) and Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Blackwell). With Dee Morris, he is currently co-editing a book for the MIT Press titled New Media Poetics (2005). His collaborative new media poems appear on-line in such journals as Postmodern Culture and ebr The Electronic Book Review, as well as in museum exhibits and art shows. His books of poetry include Rough Cut (U. of Illinois) and Measure (U. Alabama). Thom is a past President of the Electronic Literature Organizaiton.

Joseph Tabbi

ELO President
Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota 2002) and Postmodern Sublime (Cornell 1995), books that examine the effects of new technologies on contemporary American fiction. He edits the electronic book review, and has edited and introduced William Gaddis’s last fiction and collected non-fiction (Viking/Penguin). His essay on Mark Amerika appeared at the Walker Art Center’s phon:e:me site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee. Also online (the Iowa Review Web) is an essay-narrative, titled “Overwriting,” an interview, and a review of his recent work. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Helen Thorington

Helen Thorington is the Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore), and the founder and producer of the national weekly radio series, New American Radio (1987-1998), and the Turbulence (1996-present) web site. Thorington is a writer, sound, and new media artist whose work has been exhibited in a variety of international venues.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

ELO Vice-President
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media writer, artist, and scholar. His work has been presented by galleries, arts festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. He has recently edited three books: The New Media Reader (2003), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004), and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media — all from MIT Press. He has taught writing for digital media in Brown University’s Literary Arts program, New York University’s Graduate Film and Television program, the Summer Literary Seminars of St. Petersburg, Russia, and in his current academic home: UC San Diego’s Communication department. His work is discussed in Information Arts (2002), Digital Art (2003), and Art of the Digital Age (2006) — as well as in The Guardian, The New York Times, Technology Review, BBC News, Wired News, and U.S. public radio stories. He blogs at Grand Text Auto.