Literary Advisory Board (LAB)

Espen Aarseth

Espen Aarseth is an associate professor and head of the Center of Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, the founder of the Digital Arts and Culture conference, and the founder of the journal Game Studies.

Mark Amerika

Mark Amerika is the author The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood, both published by FC2/Black Ice Books. In 1993 he started the Alt-X Network, a digital art and literature site. His Grammatron was exhibited at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, The Guggenheim Museum, and, in 2002, the Whitney Biennial. He is on the faculty of University of Colorado’s Fine Art Department.

Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen was co-founder of Spy magazine, editor in chief of New York magazine, and a columnist for Time and The New Yorker. Andersen is the author of the novel Turn of the Century.

Robert Arellano

Robert Arellano is an author of print and electronic literature. In 1996, Sonicnet published Arellano’s interactive novel Sunshine ’69 under his Internet pseudonym Bobby Rabyd. In 1999, he delivered the keynote address, “Literatures of the Future-Present,” with Robert Coover at the Media Arts Symposium Stockholm. As a songwriter musician, Arellano has performed with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Will Oldham), Nick Cave, and members of Zwan.

Richard Bangs

Richard Bangs, an international river explorer, and award-winning author, is the Editor-at-Large for Expedia, a contributing editor for MSNBC, executive producer of Expedia Radio, and founder and executive publisher for Expedia Travels Magazine. He was editor-in-chief of Mungo Park, Expedia’s on-line adventure travel magazine. Bangs created and produced the first travel CD-ROMs and the first travel website.

John Barth

John Barth wrote The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), set in 17th-century Maryland and deftly satirizing historical novels. His other novels include The Floating Opera (1956), The End of the Road (1958), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Chimera (1972), Letters (1979), Sabbatical (1982), The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), and Once Upon a Time (1994).

Michael Bérubé

Michael Bérubé is professor of English and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers (1992); Public Access (1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996; Vintage, 1998); and The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (1998).

Jay David Bolter

Jay David Bolter is co-director of the New Media Center and Wesley Professor of New Media in the School of Literature, Communications, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He wrote Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (1984); Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (1991), and Remediation (1991) written in collaboration with Richard Grusin. With Michael Joyce, Bolter is the author of Storyspace.

T.C. Boyle

The award-winning author of seven novels and four collections of short stories, T. Coraghessan Boyle has been a professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1977. His novels include Water Music, Budding Prospects, World’s End (winner of the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction), East Is East, The Road to Wellville, and The Tortilla Curtain.

Laura Borràs Castanyer

Laura Borràs Castanyer graduated in Catalan Philology (1993) and Ph.D. in Romance Philology (1997) at the University of Barcelona, has attained the qualification of European Doctor (1997) and has been awarded the Special Ph.D. Prize (1998) in Social Sciences at the University of Barcelona. She is Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Barcelona. She directs and is the main researcher of the International Research Group HERMENEIA, made up of professors and researchers from various European and American universities, whose mission is to study connections between literary studies and digital technologies.

Robert Coover

Robert Coover is widely regarded as one of America’s most influential living writers, author of some fifteen groundbreaking books of fiction, including Pricksongs & Descants, The Public Burning, and many others. His 1992 essay on hypertext in the New York Times Book Review, “The End of Books,” galvanized electronic literature fans around the world. Coover has been teaching experimental courses in hypertext and multimedia narrative at Brown University for more than 15 years, and has taught CaveWriting, a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality, for the past five years. Coover, along with Jeff Ballowe and Scott Rettberg, founded the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.

Roderick Coover

Roderick Coover makes interactive cinema, video installations, films and webworks. Recent projects include, among others, the interactive series Unknown Territories about exploration in the American West (www.unknownterritories.org) and the edited book Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology In The Humanities And Arts (Chicago 2011). Some of his other works include Cultures In Webs: Working In Hypermedia With The Documentary Image (Eastgate), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank) and From Verite to Virtual (Documentary Educational Resources). A pioneer in interactive documentary arts and their poetics, his awards include Fulbright, Mellon, LEF, Whiting, and CAN fellowships, and he is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Jane Yellowlees Douglas

Jane Yellowlees Douglas is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. A specialist in hypertext/media and writing and interactive fiction, Douglas is the author of the hypertext fiction “I Have Said Nothing” and the book The End of Books, or Books Without End? Reading Hypertext Narratives.

Morgan Entrekin

Morgan Entrekin is president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., which publishes 125 titles a year. After working at Delacorte Press/Dell and Simon & Schuster, he started his own imprint at Atlantic Monthly Press in 1984. He acquired Atlantic Monthly Press in 1991 with a group of investors. In 1993, merged the company with Grove Press.

Edward Falco

Edward Falco is the author of the hypertext novel A Dream with Demons and collection hypertext poetry, Sea Island, both from Eastgate Systems. He wrote the short story collections Acid (1996; winnner of the Richard Sullivan Prize) and Plato at Scratch Daniel’s & Other Stories (1990). Falco teaches writing and literature at Virginia Tech and edits The New River, a journal of hypertext writing.

Chris Funkhouser

Chris Funkhouser directs the Communication and Media program at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is a Senior Editor at PennSound, and was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Multimedia University (Malaysia) in 2006. He is author of the critical volumes Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (2007), New Directions in Digital Poetry (2012), the chapbooks Electro þerdix (2011), LambdaMOO_Sessions (2006), and a CD-ROM e-book, Selections 2.0 (2006).

Loss Pequeño Glazier

Poet Loss Pequeño Glazier is director of the Electronic Poetry Center (“the first, and in many ways still the best, serious poetry site” –American Book Review), professor, and webmaster, College of Arts & Sciences, State University of New York at Buffalo. Glazier is author of many digital poems as well as the books Digitial Poetics, Leaving Loss Glazier, The Parts, Small Press: An Annotated Guide, and his recent Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm.

Carolyn Guyer

Carolyn Guyer is the author of several hypertext fictions including Sister Stories, Quibbling, and Izme Pass. She has also published many essays on hyperfiction, collaboration, and interactive narrative.

N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles is professor of English and Design|Media Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she teaches and write on relations between literature and science in the twentieth century. She wrote The Cosmic Web (1984), Chaos Bound (1990), Chaos and Order (1991), How We Became Posthuman (1999, winner of the Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory), and Writing Machines (2002). Hayles served as faculty director of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2001-2006.

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 G. Kirschenbaum

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. Kirschenbaum served as the first director of the new Digital Cultures and Creativity living/learning program in the Honors College at Maryland.

Raine Koskimaa

Raine Koskimaa, professor at the University of Jÿväskyla in Finland, has written extensively on digital literature, hypermedia, cyberpunk fiction, postmodernist fiction, narratology, and empirical reader-response studies. His doctoral thesis was “Digital Literature. From Text to Hypertext and Beyond.” Koskimaa helped to develop the develop the Studies in Digital Culture program at the Research Center for Contemporary Culture.

George Landow

George P. Landow, the founder and current webmaster of The Victorian, Postcolonial, and Cyberspace and Hypertext sites, is Professor of English and Art History, Brown University. His books on hypertext and digital culture include Hypermedia and Literary Studies (1991), and The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities (1993) both edited with Paul Delany, and Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992; expanded and revised as Hypertext 2.0, 1997); He also edited Hyper/Text/Theory (1994).

Deena Larsen

Deena Larsen has been a pioneering influence in the electronic literature field. Her first work, Marble Springs (Eastgate 1993) was her first interactive hyperpoetry. Her other Eastgate work, Samplers (1996), appeared on the required reading for the New South Wales Board of Curriculum. She has published over 30 works, ranging from indepth mytery novels like Disappearing Rain to poems and short stories. These appear in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, Blue Moon Review. Her latest projects include collaborating in pageSpace and a recent artist in residency at the Trristram Shandy Hall, which produced Shandean ambles, forthcoming in Drunken Boat. Larsen has served as a board member of trAce, and is a past member of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Jennifer Ley

Jennifer Ley is founder of the internet literary magazine Riding the Meridian. Much of her newest work is in hypermedia, and has appeared at the Electronic Poetry Center, in the web journals The Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme4, The Animist, Snakeskin, and Conspire, and in the trAce anthology My Millennium. Her web works have been exhibited internationally.

Nancy Lin

Nancy Lin is an editor at New York University Press.

Erik Loyer

Erik Loyer (erikloyer.com) uses tactile, textual, performative, and musical interfaces to tell stories with interactive media. The author of award-winning electronic literature works like Strange Rain (2011), Chroma (2001), and The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998), Loyer began his career as an intern at The Voyager Company and currently heads the interactive design studio Song New Creative (song.nu), develops story-driven interactive entertainment under the Opertoon label (opertoon.com), and is Creative Director for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (scalar.usc.edu) and the digital humanities journal Vectors (vectorsjournal.org).

Judy Malloy

Judy Malloy has been writing hypernarratives since 1986 when she began writing Uncle Roger on the WeLL. Her hyperfictions include its Name Was Penelope (1990, 1993) Forward Anywhere (with Cathy Marshall, 1996), l0ve0ne, and The Roar of Destiny Emanated From the Refrigerator.

Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, founding the review Locus Solus in 1961 with John Ashbery, Keneth Koch, James Schuyler. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several other books of poetry and prose, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, (a novella in French; 2000), The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (2002), and My Life in CIA (2004).

Larry McCaffery

Larry McCaffery has published numerous scholarly books and essays dealing with postmodern literature and culture, including four volumes of interviews: Anything Can Happen (with Tom LeClair), Alive and Writing (with Sinda Gregory) and Across the Wounded Galaxies, and Some Other Frequency. He edited Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology. McCaffery is professor of English at San Diego State University.

Jerome McGann

Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the author of many books including Fiery Dust (1968), The Romantic Ideology (1983), The Beauty of Inflections (1985), Social Values and Poetic Acts (1988),Towards a Literature of Knowledge (1989), The Textual Condition (1991), Black Riders (1993), and Poetics of Sensibility (1996). His volumes of poetry include Air Heart Sermons (1976), Writing Home (1978), Nerves in Patterns (with James Kahn; 1979) and Four Last Poems (1996). McGann is editor of the multivolume The Complete Poetical Works of Byron (1980– ), The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993), and the on-line The Rossetti Archive.

Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle from January to June each year, and a visiting faculty member at the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. from July to December. Her recent collections of poems include Hinge & Sign and The Father of the Predicaments; her recent books also include translations of Euripides and Paul Celan.

Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort develops computational poetry and art, often collaboratively, and studies creative computing of all sorts. He is professor of digital media at MIT and also teaches at the School for Poetic Computation. He lives in New York and Boston with his spouse, Flourish Klink. Montfort earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania, a Masters in creative writing (poetry) from Boston University, a Masters in media arts and sciences from MIT, and undergraduate degrees in liberal arts and computer science from the University of Texas. Projects of Montfort’s include several very small-scale poetry generators such as the ones in the ppg256 series and Concrete Perl; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written in one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a co-written novel on stickers documented in a book; the interactive fictions Winchester’s Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume; and several other work of digital poetry and art, including the collaborations Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland) and The Deletionist (with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul). Montfort works in several different contexts, which include the Web, book publication, and literary reading but also the demoscene and gallery exhibition. He translates computational projects and his own work has been translated into half a dozen languages. For instance, his free-software computer-generated novel World Clock was translated to Polish and published in ha!art’s Liberatura series, which also includes the Polish translation of Finnegans Wake. Many of Montfort’s works, which are available as free software, have also been modified and transformed by others to become the basis for new work; his short generator Taroko Gorge has been the basis for dozens of published remixes in addition to projects in many classes.

Judd Morrissey

Judd Morrissey is an electronic writer and creator of multimodal works encompassing elements of internet art, live performance, site-responsive installation, and structured public participation. He is the creator of widely studied and anthologized digital literary works including The Precession (2011), The Last Performance [dot org] (2009), The Jew’s Daughter (2006), and My Name is Captain, Captain (2002). His projects are presented nationally and internationally in festivals, exhibitions, conferences and commission contexts. Morrissey is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches courses in networked and computational writing, digital art, and contemporary performance. He was a collaborator of the former international performance collective, Goat Island, and is a fellow of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant program. http://www.judisdaid.com

Robert Polito

Robert Polito is the director of the New School’s Writing Program. He is author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompso, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar, Doubles (a book of poems); A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light of Sandover; and At the Titan’s Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron’s Poetry. His poetry and essays have been widely published in publications including the New Yorker, BOMB, The Boston Review and The New York Times Book Review.

Jill Walker Rettberg

Jill Walker Rettberg is an associate professor of humanistic informatics at the University of Bergen, and does research on how people tell stories online. She has been a research blogger since October 2000, and is writing a book on blogging for Polity Press. Jill is the founder of ELINOR, Electronic Literature in Nordic Countries.

Scott Rettberg

Scott Rettberg is a professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Prior to moving to Norway in 2006, Rettberg directed the new media studies track of the literature program at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, and Implementation. His work has been exhibited both online and at art venues, including the Beall Center in Irvine California, the Slought Foundation in Philadelpia, and The Krannert Art Museum. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, where he directed major projects funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Rettberg is the project leader of the HERA-Funded ELMCIP research project, the director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base: http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase, and the leader of the Electronic Literature Research Group. Rettberg is the conference chair of the 2015 Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Festival: The End(s) of Electronic Literature.

Jim Rosenberg

Jim Rosenberg, who works as a programmer, began a life-long concern with non-linear poetic forms in 1966, with a series of polylinear poems called Word Nets. By 1968 this concern had evolved to an ongoing series of Diagram Poems, which includes Diagrams Series 4. He worked beginning in 1988 developing interactive poems (including Intergrams) on a Macintosh computer using HyperCard software.

Joanna Scott

Joanna Scott is the author of 6 works of fiction, including the novels Make Believe, The Manikin, and Arrogance, a collection of short fiction, Various Antidotes, and Tourmaline. Her work has appeared in Salon, Harpers, Esquire, Conjunctions, and The Paris Review. She has received a MacArthur fellowship, a Lannan Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and has been a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner and the Pulitzer Prize. She is Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Alan Sondheim

Alan Sond­heim is a cross-disciplinary artist, writer, and the­o­rist, he has exhib­ited, per­formed and lec­tured widely. Sond­heim has had a suc­cess­ful res­i­dency at Eye­beam Art + Tech­nol­o­gy­Cen­ter in New York; while there he worked with a num­ber of col­lab­o­ra­tors on per­for­mances and sound pieces deal­ing with pain and anni­hi­la­tion. He also cre­ated a series of texts and 3d print­ing mod­els of ‘dead or wounded avatars.’ His blog at http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim?page=24 presents much of this material.

Nan A. Talese

Nan A. Talese is a senior vice president of Doubleday and the publisher and editorial director of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a trade book publishing imprint known for its literary excellence. She worked at Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Houghton Mifflin, where she started in 1981 as executive editor and became editor in chief and publisher. Talese came to Doubleday as Senior Vice President in 1988 and published books by Margaret Atwood, Thomas Cahill, Pat Conroy, Alex Kotlotwitz, Ian McEwan, Barry Unsworth and others.

Takayuki Tatsumi

Professor Takayuki Tatsumi of Keio University in Japan is one of the leading Asian experts on new American writing. He is the author of several books, including Cyberpunk America, The Rhetoric of Contemporary Science Fiction, Metafiction as Ideology, A Manifesto for Japanoids, New Americanist Poetics, New York Decadence, and The Metaphor Murders. He has also co-edited Storming the Reality Studio with Larry McCaffery.

Sue Thomas

Sue Thomas is Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University. She has published two novels, Correspondence and Water. Her fifth book, recently completed, examines virtual and physical landscapes.

Susana Pajares Tosca

Susana P. Tosca is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, and has talked and published extensively on digital textuality, hypertext, computer games and cyberculture in Spanish and English. She serves on several international program committees for conferences including ACM’s Hypertext and Digital Arts and Culture, is a hypertext theme editor for JoDI (Journal of Digital Information), and is an editor of Game Studies.

Rob Wittig

LAB Coordinator
Rob Wittig is director and lead writer for TANK20_literary_studio. Wittig has been writing online since 1983, when, with members of the literary performance group, Invisible Seattle, he inaugurated the legendary electronic bulletin board IN.S.OMNIA. He received a Fulbright Scholarship to Paris to study theoretical and practical aspects of collaborative, interactive literature on the invitation of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. He wrote Invisible Rendezvous, Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing.