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 include For Girls & Others (Bloof, 2007), Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005), Gamers (Soft Skull, 2004), and several chapbooks. Her third and fourth poetry books are forthcoming from Bloof Books as a two-volume project; a collection called Brink in fall 2012, and a book-length speculative poem called The Seam in spring 2013.
Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-A-Day/PoemFlow by the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Daily, the Awl, Eoagh, No Tell Motel, Black Warrior Review, the Equalizer, Women's Studies Quarterly, Barrelhouse, Open Letters Monthly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the New School, where she also served as the editor-in-chief of LIT.
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.
For more information, please visit shannacompton.com.
