[Purple-Blurb] Spring 2013 readings

[Nick Montfort]

Friends of the Blurb,

I'm pleased to announce the PURPLE BLURB lineup for SPRING 2013:

  February 11, Jason McIntosh, The Warbler's Nest

  March 8, BONUS BLURB! AWP Offsite reading w/ the New School's LIT magazine

  March 11, Debra Di Blasi, Skin of the Sun

  April 8, Gretchen Henderson, Galerie de Difformité

The three regular Spring 2013 events are Mondays at 5:30pm in MIT's room 
14E-310, near the Writing Office and just one floor up from the Trope 
Tank. This is in the East Wing of Building 14, across the building's 
courtyard from the Hayden Library. Building 14 is *not* part of the Media 
Lab Complex and 14E-310 is not located there.

Thanks to guest organizer Gretchen Henderson for putting together the 
semester's main program of readings.

Purple Blurb is also hosting an offsite AWP reading with the New School's 
LIT magazine. Conference registration is not required for this event, 
which is free and open to the public, no reservation required, as all 
Purple Blurb events are. This event will take place in 6-120 at 6pm on 
Friday, March 8; details will be announced soon.


February 11, 5:30pm in 14E-310
Jason McIntosh
Presents the interactive fiction "The Warbler's Nest"

Jason McIntosh is an independent games critic, designer, and scholar. 
During the previous decade, he produced “The Gameshelf”, a public-access 
TV series examining both tabletop and digital games, and “Jmac’s Arcade,” 
a set of video monologues on growing up within the arcade culture of the 
1980s. More recently, he’s taught a game-studies lab at Northeastern 
University, published the XYZZY Award-winning work of interactive fiction 
“The Warbler's Nest”, crafted the iPad edition of the tabletop game 
“Sixis” by Chris Cieslik, and worked as a game-design consultant for other 
clients. He continues to write game-criticism essays on The Gameshelf’s 
blog, and produces the occasional episode of the podcast series “Play of 
the Light”, which he co-hosts with Matthew Weise. His website collecting 
all this stuff may be found at jmac.org


March 11, 5:30pm in 14E-310
Debra Di Blasi
“Skin of the Sun: Five Iterations Toward Human As Novel”
Followed by a discussion of the literary publisher’s role in the 21st 
Century

Debra Di Blasi is a multi-genre, multimedia author of six books, including 
The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions, Drought & Say What You Like, and 
Skin of the Sun. Awards include a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction 
from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, 
Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and Diagram Innovative Fiction Award. Her 
fiction is included in a many leading anthologies of innovative writing 
and has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and 
abroad. Her essays, art reviews and articles can be found in a variety of 
international, national and regional publications. She frequently lectures 
on the intersection of literature and technology and is working on a 
nonfiction book on related topics.


April 8, 5:30pm in 14E-310
Gretchen E. Henderson
“Galerie de Difformité:The Book as Body, The Body as Book”
Followed by an OPEN MIC!

Gretchen E. Henderson is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a metaLAB 
fellow at Harvard, who writes across genres, the arts, and music to 
invigorate her critical and creative practices. She is the author of two 
novels, The House Enters the Street and Galerie de Difformité (winner of 
the Madeleine Plonsker Prize), a collection of nonfiction, On Marvellous 
Things Heard, and a poetry chapbook, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea. Among 
other projects at MIT, she is working on Ugliness: A Cultural History (for 
Reaktion Books), while continuing the collaborative deformation of Galerie 
de Difformité: a print book that is interfacing with the history and 
future of the book, networked online, inviting readers to participate in 
its (de)formation across media.


Purple Blurb started in Fall 2007. All events are free and open to the 
public. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald 
fund and Comparative Media Studies / Writing and Humanistic Studies.

This semester's events and previous events are listed on the Web:

http://nickm.com/if/purple_blurb/

Except for the March 8 reading; a full description of that will be added 
soon.

  -Nick