Fall 2011 Contributors:

Alan Bigelow was the 2011 winner of the BIPVAL international Prix de Poésie Média. His work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction and poetry have appeared in Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, SFMOMA (Open Space), Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, 14th Japan Media Arts Festival (The National Art Center, Tokyo), FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, The Museum of New Art (MONA, Detroit), Art Tech Media 2010, FILE 2007-2011, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, New River Journal, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and elsewhere.

Recently, in addition to teaching full-time at Medaille College, he was a visiting online lecturer in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, UK.

You can see Alan Bigelow’s work at http://www.webyarns.com.

Andy Campbell is a digital writer who has been working at the forefront of digital fiction since 1993. He is the author of www.dreamingmethods.com, a website described by the Times Educational Supplement as “a distinctive voice that couldn’t be replicated in print.” He is currently Director of Digital Media for the innovative arts/media charity One to One Development Trust and Creative Developer on the pioneering transmedia project Inanimate Alice.

Catalytic converters became mandatory car components due to tightening EPA regulations in 1975. Twenty-five years later, Sean Conaway moved catalytic converters from large pallets onto conveyor belts. He then landscaped, and finally cooked, before deciding he might be better at writing fiction. The jury’s still out.

Collaborators include Sean Conaway, Fred D’Aguiar, Rob Kenagy, Christopher Linforth, Michelle Potgeter, Mike Roche, James Stolen, Brianna P. Stout, Quinn White and Amanda Zubillaga.

Fred D’Aguiar teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing Programs at Virginia Tech where he is the Gloria D. Smith Professor of English. His most recent poetry book is Continental Shelf.

Natalia Fedorova is a new media artist, writer, translator and literary scholar. Fedorova holds a Ph.D. in literary theory from Herzen State University (St-Petersburg). She is an author of publications on avant-garde poetry, kitetic poetry, concrete poetry, hyperfiction, literary text generators and video poetry, as well as a curator and creator of VIDEO.txt, video poetry festival in St- Petersburg. Fedorova is an author of hyperfiction piece with multiple endings, 7, an interactive novel Madame Ebaressa and a Butterfly, co-written with Sergeij Kitov, and a number of short prose fragments. In collaboration with Taras Mashtalir created a series of video poems (Snow Queen, Just Do Not Not Do It, In Your Voice, Machine Poetry Manifesto). Currently she is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Trope Tank, in Writing and Humanistic Studies, at MIT, working with Nick Montfort on the translation of electronic literature.

Chris Funkhouser is Associate Professor and Director of the Communication and Media program in the Department of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches Digital Poetry, Electronic Literature, Cybertext, and other classes. He has also taught seminars at Naropa University (2007) and University of Pennsylvania (2010), and is a Senior Editor at PennSound. He is author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (2007), New Directions in Digital Poetry (2012), and the chapbooks Electro Þerdix (Least Weasel, 2011), LambdaMOO_Sessions (Writer’s Forum, 2006), and an e-book (CD-ROM), Selections 2.0, published by the Faculty of Creative Multimedia at Multimedia University (Malaysia), where he was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar in 2006.

Scott Henderson enjoys bicycling around town and occasionally dabbles with computers.

Amy Hufnagel (www.amyhufnagel.com) is a cross-genre artist whose work, which tends to focus on “things she does not understand,” addresses themes of technology and nature, human/technological connections, as well as textual studies and cultural history. Her multimedia work has been presented at SUNY Buffalo, Brown University, and at the Drawing Center in NYC. Her writings and photographs have appeared in Technology Review (MIT Press), and Crart (South Korea), and a variety of online and gallery settings.

She received funding from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for new alterative process photography work, and has participated in many group exhibitions and screenings; she currently works in a number of educational venues as a writer and public program designer. She is mother to two wonderful daughters and married to poet Christopher Funkhouser, with whom she runs We Press.

Rob Kenagy is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. He likes pizza.

Christopher Linforth is the editor of The Anthem Guide to Short Fiction (Anthem Press, 2011). He also has work published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Permafrost, Chicago Quarterly Review, Camas, and other literary journals. He maintains the website The Outsider.

Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT and president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He develops text generators and interactive fiction and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Montfort co-edited The New Media Reader and The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 and wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (with Ian Bogost), and Riddle & Bind. His next book, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, is a collaboration with nine other authors about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program.

Born from the Oklahoma flatlands of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives, building confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. Currently he professes Net Art and Electronic Literature at Australia’s Griffith University in the Gold Coast's contradictory shores. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking and playing with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational boards he frequents (Australia Council Literature Board), and numerous other accolades (Webby Award), but in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year.

Michelle Potgeter is a first year MFA student at Virginia Tech.

Mike Roche writes poems in Virginia Tech’s MFA program. He is in his first year.

James Stolen was born in Calcutta, India and was adopted at the age of two months. He has lived in Alaska and Oregon, and has traveled extensively abroad, including studying in Europe and volunteering in Africa. He most recently served two years in the Kingdom of Lesotho as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English and HIV/AIDS curriculum at St. Theresa Secondary School in a village located in the highlands. Now, as an MFA candidate in fiction at Virgina Tech, James is currently writing a novel. He also has a short story forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review.

Brianna Stout spent five years teaching high school English, and now she teaches and writes at Virginia Tech as an MFA candidate in poetry. She served as poetry editor for The Minnesota Review and as a reader for Toad. Her poem “Resolution: No More” received honorable mention in the Virginia Tech/Poetry Society of Virginia Prize in 2010. She is a top-ranked rollerchairball player.

Quinn White is studying poetry at Virginia Tech.

Lynda Williams works as a freelance writer for Multiple Learning Solutions (Cambridge) and as a representative for FilmClub, encouraging the use of film in schools. She is currently providing educational web content for the Official London Olympics 2012 website. Lynda completed her MA in Creative Writing-Scriptwriting at University of East Anglia and received the highly acclaimed Skillset Bursary Award for New Scriptwriters 2006. She finds stories in everyday situations and writes with sensitivity, compassion and humour. She has lived and worked in Andalucia, Spain and Baltimore, USA as a barmaid, waitress and teacher. She is married with one daughter.

Yes, you. You there, sitting at the computer, clicking on things. You may have an MFA, you may have publications, or you may not. Either way, we want you to collaborate.

Amanda Zubillaga is an MFA candidate in fiction at Virginia Tech. She was the recipient of the Virginia Tech Fiction Prize in 2010. Amanda has served as fiction editor of The Minnesota Review and its sister publication, the online arts journal Toad, and is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novella.