newsletters

Fall 2026: Poetic Technologies and Spaces

by Tegan Pyke
Friday, October 2nd 2026

Hello, hello!

Welcome to yet another newsletter from electronic book review—tamer than ever! (For a limited time!)

ebr Fall 2026

Kicking off this season’s articles, Stuart Moulthrop’s ‘Movie Laughed in Sprocket-Language, or: a Night at the Chatbot,’ tackles LLM poetics from the teaching trenches, using a conversation with his custom GPT model and the work of his students to illuminate the blind spots that arise between the extremes of the AI debate.

Connecting AI’s rise to the evolution of writing technology and old-school cybernetics, Davin Heckman’s essay ‘AI: A Matter of Significance’ asks why we’re focusing on the death of “traditional” literacy instead of embracing new literary potentialities.

And, in ‘Rhetoric and Poetics of AI,’ Manuel Portela and Ana Marques da Silva utilize found text to turn tech bros, academics, and sensationalist headlines into a staged drama between anthropomorphized versions of rhetoric and poetics. 

Meanwhile, over at ebr interviews, Keira Obbard sits down with poet, speaker, and educator Najwa Zebian to unpack the intricacies of literary creative expression on social media platforms, in ‘“Poetry is the Language of the Soul”: Najwa Zebian on Instapoetry, Literary Value, and the Healing Power of Words.’ 

ebr’s fall reviews kick off with Patricia López-Gay’s ‘The Poetics of Augmented Attention: Tina Escaja’s Realidad mitigada,’ which, alongside a fantastic critical breakdown of Escaja’s text, examines Escaja’s decades of tech-forward artistic experimentation.

In ‘This Is Not for You, but Who Can You Be? A Quarter Century of House of Leaves and its Digital Afterlives,’ Abhirami Ajith tracks the digital afterlife of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and ultimately connects deep-web forum sleuthing back to contemporary literary theory.

And last in our list, but by no means least, Yasmina Chaara’s ‘In A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States’ dives into Ali Behdad’s book of the same name, discovering the mental gymnastics behind America’s self-made national mythos.

Call for Papers: Stephanie Strickland Gathering

ebr is working on a Stephanie Strickland Gathering, led by Guest Editor Monika Górska-Olesińska (University of Łódź, Poland).
                                                                     
Stephanie Strickland—a pioneer of media poetry, one of the earliest directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO Board member since 2003), and an active contributor to shaping its vision—has long been a vital presence within the ELO community.                 
                                                                     
Since taking part in the 1995 NEH Summer Seminar “Literature in Transition: The Impact of Information Technologies,” she has made a significant contribution to the field of electronic literature—not only as the author of canonical works that transcend the familiar boundaries of poetic experimentation (True North [1997], the multi-part project V [2002; 2014], slippingglimpse [2007], Sea and Spar Between [2010])—works that exist in multiple versions, migrate across media, and remain open to translation and transformation—but also as an influential critical thinker, whose writing has rigorously developed a new theoretical framework for understanding poetry as it evolves within the bio-techno-logical realm. (Katherine N. Hayles wrote as early as 2003, “It is fairly rare for an important poet to be an important critic, but Strickland seems well on her way to accomplishing this double achievement.”)
                                                                     
Strickland has frequently collaborated with others—among them Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, Nick Montfort, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, and Ian Hatcher—demonstrating a remarkable willingness (despite having a powerful personality) to “dissolve her individual claims and feelings of ownership while heightening mutual responsibility.” These collaborations have resulted not only in innovative projects but also in lasting intellectual and personal relationships. Their traces can be found in the materials meticulously archived by Strickland (currently housed at The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University), including drafts of conference presentations, project sketches, and email correspondence documenting the exchange of ideas.

In preparing a special issue of ebr devoted to Stephanie Strickland’s career and oeuvre—as a poet, thinker, researcher, organizer, field-shaping figure, mentor, and friend—we invite submissions of scholarly essays, shorter contributions, memoir-style narratives (including video and audio formats), reviews, and creative works.

We are particularly interested in:

  • Essays that illuminate the complex and multifaceted relationships between art, science, and technology in Strickland’s creative practice

  • Studies that unravel the dense web of intertextual references in her work, spanning literature (Emily Dickinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Stanisław Lem, Bertolt Brecht), philosophy (Simone Weil, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Gregory Bateson), and the sciences (Willard Gibbs, Richard Feynman, René Thom, Georg Riemann, James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Grothendieck, John Conway, Conrad Hal Waddington)

  • Reflections on the collaborative creative processes from which Strickland’s digital poetry instruments or poietic systems have emerged

  • Memoir-style accounts related to Strickland (in any media format)

  • Essays and texts that approach Strickland’s work, both artistic, critical, and curatorial, through the lens of women’s studies and feminist theory

Submit the draft of your piece to our submissions portal.

Extended deadline: 15 October 2026

Call for Papers: Talan Memmott Gathering

An author of more than 40 works and a 2021 laureate of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Maverick Award, Talan Memmott has contributed to the development of the field with an impressive roster of e-literary works that span not only a few decades of rapid technological change, but also a variety of genres: from HTML- and Flash-based experimental artworks to digital performances to video essays. His artistic practice is located at the crossroads of digital poetics, electronic literature, and new media art, and, in his own words, he is interested in “finding a balance between fine art, experimental design and experiments with language, ” intentionally “confusing the aesthetic and the poetic” (Talan Memmott’s introduction to his exhibition Works on Screen 1998-2016 at The NEXT.)

Memmott is often interested in exposing the processes behind the machinic aspects of creative work.

In parallel, Talan Memmott has also engaged with digital media theory, as demonstrated by his trailblazing work Lexia to Perplexia (2000). He was also among the first to theorize memes as a new cultural form. Recently, he has been engaging with crip theory and aesthetics, most notably in his ongoing Introducing Lary series of works (2023-).

He is also known for his experimental pedagogy, both in traditional academic settings (as the founder of the Creative Digital Media program at Winona State University and the initiator of the 48-Hour Video Dash there, a contest with significant student participation) and in their reverse, the UnderAcademy, which Memmott established in 2012 and where he has also served as Provisional Provost.

For the special Gathering dedicated to Talan Memmott’s oeuvre in digital art and electronic literature, we invite papers, reviews, short-form reviews, riPOSTes, and other interventions regarding the topics, forms, and aesthetic strategies that have been emerging throughout the energetic field of Memmott’s creative and theoretical output. We are interested in works dedicated to e-literary heritage preservation (of which his work is certainly a part), as well as (preferably) in articles locating Memmott’s work within recent developments in digital art and e-literature. Or, in a truly UnderAcademic spirit, we are interested in all instances of contrasting, interrogating, invigorating, probing, bending, bastardizing, de-, re and post enshittificating recent developments in the field of electronic literature and digital art. You name it. You write it.

Submission deadline: 30 October 2026
Submit full articles via ebr’s open journal system.

Notes of acceptance: 10 November 2026

Some of the resources to consult:

See you next season for more

electronic book review