Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort's 1999 Winchester's Nightmare: A Novel Machine was the first work of electronic literature to be issued in a "hardback" edition, with a working computer included. His Oulipo-inspired Ad Verbum was the top pick of authors in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition and won that year's Best Puzzles XYZZY Award. Those two are works of interactive fiction, with a text-adventure interface, but Montfort also writes hypertext works, such as the collaborative novel and faux government report The Ed Report written with William Gillespie. The two have another collaboration, 2002,that will be published in the appropriate year by Spineless Books.

Montfort earned a Masters in poetry in Boston University's creative writing program after completing a Masters in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. In Spring 2002, he will be a visiting professor in the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore. Montfort has organized electronic literature readings in Boston, Providence, and New York. He has two books forthcoming from MIT Press: The New Media Reader (coeditor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin) and Twisty Little Passages, a critical history of interactive fiction.

This speaker appears in the Thursday night Cabaret.