No longer just for kids and fanatics, video games have been growing in sophistication and popularity with each passing year and their cultural reach is expanding too - spawning magazines, international conferences, university courses, and blockbuster movies. In Gamers, noted writers, artists, scholars, poets, and programmers talk about what gaming means to them and discuss the growing impact of video games on fashion, fiction, film, and music. Contributors include Richard Powers, Colson Whitehead, Shelley Jackson, Matthew Sharpe, Marc Nesbitt, Daniel Nester, Whitney Pastorek, and Jim Andrews. Essays feature a glittering mix of topics from the esoteric to the purely entertaining: gender identity in relation to gaming, video golf as a meditative exercise, Ms. Pacman versus The Sims, the similarities between writing fiction and programming, the confessions of a video poker junkie, and much more in this witty, wide-screen look at how video games are becoming part of the cultural landscape.
Shanna Compton's books and chapbooks include For Girls & Others (Bloof Books, 2007), Down Spooky, (Winnow Press, 2005), GAMERS: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels, (Soft Skull, 2004), Big Confetti (with Shafer Hall, HEHF 2004), Closest Major Town (HEHF, 2006), Good Morning Romantics (Bloof, 2010) and Rare Vagrants (Dusie, 2010). She's currently finishing her third collection, with new poems appearing in The Awl, Women's Studies Quarterly, No Tell Motel, Black Warrior Review, The Equalizer, and elsewhere.
Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of publications and several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2005, Poet's Bookshelf II, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Bowery Women, Digerati, and the Poetry Foundation website.
Shanna earned an MFA in Poetry at the New School in 2002, where she also served as the editor of LIT from 2002-2005. She works as a freelance copywriter and graphic designer, and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing. Please visit her website at www.shannacompton.com.
