Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania and masters degrees from MIT (in media arts and sciences) and Boston University (in creative writing — poetry).
The digital media writing projects Montfort has undertaken include the blog Grand Text Auto, where he and five others write about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; ppg256, a 256-character poetry generator; 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; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester's Nightmare: A Novel Machine. His work has been presented in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Irvine, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Washington D.C. and in Brazil, Canada, England, Mexico, Norway, Spain, and Taiwan.
Montfort 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 wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which was acknowledged by the Oulipo as the world's longest literary palindrome. He is now investigating narrative variation in interactive fiction and the role of platforms in creative computing. His latest book, co-authored with Ian Bogost, is Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series.
Also available: a high-res version of this photo, my curriculum vitae, 100-word summary.
—Nick Montfort, October 2008
[to the main page of nickm.com]
In 100 words...
Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).