Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Montfort's digital media writing projects include the interactive fiction system Curveship; the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game;Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; and several works of interactive fiction: Winchester's Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume.
Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains literary riddles and constrained poems, is Montfort's latest book. With Ian Bogost, he wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series. He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world's longest literary palindrome. He also edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). He is currently organizing and co-writing 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a 10-author single-voice book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program.
