Bernard Cohen : Alan McDonald : Christy Sheffield Sanford
Alan Sondheim

All the trAce Writers-in-Residence spoke at the conference.Each residency lasted for six months, and all but Bernard Cohen's were 100% web-based. Bernard travelled from his native Australia to live in the East Midlands and work with local writers on internet projects. Alan McDonald, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim all worked entirely online via email, LinguaMOO, and the trAce discussion board.

BERNARD COHEN June to December 1999 (click here for Bernard's Writer-in-Residence website) SIX MONTHS IN CYBERSPACE SIX MONTHS ON Listen to presentation Bernard Cohen was writer-in-residence at trAce in the second half of 1999, transplanted from Australia to a virtual geography. This paper presents reflections on a residency which embraced subjects from Luddism to Teletubbies. Bernard Cohen is the author of three novels: Tourism, The Blindman's Hat (which won the 1996 Australian/Vogel Literary Award) and Snowdome. He has three times been named by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of the Best Young Australian Novelists, has received several Australia Council fellowships and won a number of short story competitions. He was born in 1963 and now lives in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. Back to top

ALAN McDONALD March 1999 until August 2000 (Click here for Alan's Writer-in-Residence website) JOINED UP WRITING: Creating and running collaborative writing projects on the World Wide Web - from oddesses in cyberspace to imaginary countries. Listen to presentation Alan McDonald founded unHoly Island (http://www.poptel.org.uk/unholy). He is best-known however as a scriptwriter for television (including Brookside and EastEnders) and radio, including 'E Love' (Radio 4, 1998) about a transatlantic e-mail love affair. He has published two novels, non-fiction, and also develops computer Help systems and teaches writing. Contact Alan at alan.mcd@geo2.poptel.org.uk Back to top

CHRISTY SHEFFIELD SANFORD February - July 1999 (Click here for Christy's Writer-in-Residence website) THE WEB AS A WRITER'S MEDIUM Listen to presentation Christy Sheffield Sanford, trAce's first Virtual Writer-in-Residence, discusses web work that demonstrates the uniqueness of the medium and its benefit to writers. Christy Sheffield Sanford was selected as a 1999 Alden B Dow Creativity Fellow to develop a web-based essay. This work "Toward a Theory of Web-Specific Art-Writing" has been accepted for the February issue of BeeHive. Sanford and Reiner Strasser's collaboration ~~Water~~Water~~Water~~--commissioned by Now Ninety9 and DA2-- was shown in November in Nottingham and Bristol. Her web piece "Jill Swimming" based on a collalboration with Jill Burton and Donna Mitchell, was featured as part of the Aix-en-Provence Art Contemporaine exhibit in June, 1999. For Riding the Meridian's October issue, she curated a Hypertext collection and participated in an Online Roundtable Discussion. Sanford's online work has been praised by George Myers Jr. in the Columbus Dispatch, George Landow in Hypertext 2.0 and N. Katherine Hayles in ArtForum. Her web works have been published by New River, frAme, Light and Dust, Enterzone, Salt Hill, The Little Magazine and many other ezines and project sites. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and eight other grants. Her work "NoPink" won The Well's 1998 prize for the Best Hyperlinked Work on the Web. She is the author of seven books including The H's: The Spasm of a Requiem, The Italian Smoking Piece and Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape. Back to top

ALAN SONDHEIM September 1999 to March 2000 (Click here for Alan's Writer-in-Residence website) WRITING INTO THE TRACE Listen to presentation 'I will describe my work as writer-in-residence at trAce, including the four projects I initiated; I will also discuss my other writings in relation to these. In particular, I want to describe the WRITTEN BODY, BODY OF WRITING, as it applies to my work and others'. Alan Sondheim is a poet, critic, and theorist who writes on and about the Internet. His books include Disorders of the Real, and the anthology Being on Line. He co-moderates several email lists, including Fiction of Philosophy, Cybermind, and Cyberculture. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with cat and cacti. Email sondheim@panix.com http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Back to top