Joshua Cohen
Pulitzer prize winning author of Witz, Book of Numbers, The Netanyahus
Joshua Cohen is the author of six novels, one collection of short fiction, and one collection of nonfiction. Called “a major American writer” by the New York Times, and “an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today” by the New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Mary Costello
Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year Award for Academy Street, author of The China Factory, Barcelona, and The River Capture
Mary Costello is the author of two short story collections and two novels. Her work has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the EU Prize for Literature. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award and the overall Irish Book of the Year in 2014. The River Capture (2019), her second novel, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, the Kerry Novel of the Year and the Dalkey Novel Award. A new novel, A Beautiful Loan, is forthcoming in 2026. Mary lives in Galway.
Dr Valérie Bénéjam
Valérie Bénéjam teaches literature at Nantes Université
She has written extensively about Joyce. Her book Joyce’s Theatrical Poetics will be out with Florida UP in the spring.
Dr Julie McCormick Weng
Julie McCormick Weng is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University
She has published widely on Irish modernism and has coedited two volumes, including Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024) with Malcolm Sen, and Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse University Press, 2019) with Kathryn Conrad and Cóilín Parsons.
SPECIAL GUESTS
Carolyn Guyer
Pioneer author of hypertext fiction, including Quibbling, creator and curator of ‘Mother Millennia’ collaborative web work, co-author of Lasting Image
Digital literature theorist and translator, Mariusz Pisarski has written that “If Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story is the Yin of hypertext literature, then Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling is the Yang: perhaps the ultimate hypertext of female sensitivity, poetics, and politics.” Which, one supposes, makes them “Formelly confounded with amother,” (FW, 112), fittingly enough for Guyer, whose online collaborative forum Mother Millenia in 2000 joined her HiPitched Voices, 1994, a women’s hypertext collective that initiated a collaborative writing project in its own wing of Robert Coover’s Hypertext Hotel at Brown University.
More about Carolyn
Her first hypertext, Quibbling, was followed by Izme Pass, 1991, co-authored with Martha Petry, and yet another collaborative hypertext, Sister Stories, with Joyce and the distinguished Mayanist anthropologist, his sister Rosemary, published by NYU Press Online in 2000. Guyer originally came to hypertext as a mixed-media visual artist, and in recent years has returned to textiles as her primary visual art interest. It was in this medium that she and Michael Joyce created More Than a Year, an art book poem on canvas, translated into Polish and published by Katarzyna Bazarnik and Zenon Fajfer, now part of the Liberatura Collection at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow. Now retired, Guyer was Director of Web Development at Vassar College (USA).
Michael Joyce
Pioneer creator of hypertext fiction, including afternoon. a story, twilight, and co-author of Lasting Image, poet and novelist (War outside Ireland)
Michael Joyce is Professor Emeritus of English and Media Studies at Vassar, the latter program which he co-founded. His seventeen books and seminal digital works— most recently the poems Light in its Common Place (2020), the novel Remedia: a picaresque (2018), and the Kindle e-book The World Beyond (2021)— span a career as novelist, poet, critic, theorist, digital literature pioneer, and multimedia artist.
More about Michael
In the early 1990’s The New York Times called afternoon “the granddaddy of hypertext fictions.” In 2020 it was the focus of an international online thirtieth year festschrift hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver (USA) as part of the Electronic Literature Organization Covid-year virtual annual conference (more here). His other digital works include “On the Birthday of the Stranger” in the inaugural online Evergreen Review; Twilight, A Symphony; Twelve Blue; and The Sonatas of St. Francis, created with Guyer, and Irish author Matthew Hanlon. Michael Joyce’s scholarly books include a volume of media essays and short fiction, plus two collections of essays on digital media. Other collaborative multimedia works include his texts for Los Angeles painter Alexandra Grant’s “Lost Hills Hokku” at Honor Fraser Gallery and “The Ladder Series” at MOCA; as well as for video artist Anita Pantin’s Canzoni di morte. An early Hörspiel “Joyce in Berlin” was part of Stefan Schemat’s Osmotic Minds which won Honorable Mention at Ars Electronica 1999.
Áine Stapleton
Dance artist and filmmaker from Ireland, with a particular focus on the biographies of lesser-known female artists
Since 2014, she has created films about the dancer Lucia Joyce, including Horrible Creature – “a stunning visual experience” Film Ireland. Her film installation, Somewhere in the Body, explores Lucia’s presence in her father’s book Finnegans Wake. Her latest feature film, When Life is Silent, explores the dance history of Monte Verità in Switzerland, focusing on the biography of German dancer Mary Wigman. Prior to her work in film, she worked in live performance and co-directed Fitzgerald and Stapleton Dance Theatre with Emma Fitzgerald – “touches deeper, stranger chords” The New Yorker.
More about Áine
Áine has produced and toured her solo and collaborative work internationally at venues including Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Chocolate Factory Theatre (NYC), Bakelit Multi-Arts Center (Budapest), Mermaid Arts Centre (Bray), Riffraff Kino (Zurich), the Irish Film Institute, and Palais de l’Europe (Strasbourg) during Ireland’s EU Presidency. Her work has been funded by various organisations including The Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, Fondation Jan Michalski, and the Permanent Representation of Ireland in Strasbourg. She is a member of the Irish electronic band Everything Shook. She holds a BA in Dance Studies, an MA in Cultural Policy and Management, and is currently a PhD researcher with Ulster University.
Zenon Fajfer
Polish poet, playwright, performer, co-author, with Katarzyna Bazarnik, of Finnegans Make after Thought, Word and Deed of Mr James Joyce (premiered in Dublin 1996). The author of visual poems, including the cycle A Portrait of the Artist (1996), used in the logo of XXX International James Joyce Symposium.
One of the representatives of the neo-avant-garde, creator and theoretician of liberature, a literary genre which embraces works integrating text with often unconventional forms of the book into a meaningful whole (manifesto of “Liberature. An Appendix to a Dictionary of Literary Terms”, 1999), known for devising an interactive poetic form called “the emanational poem,” in which invisible, dimensions of text coexist simultaneously. He also uses the digital media, creating his own version of kinetic poems and hypertextual poetry. His Ars poetica and Powieki are anthologised in Electronic Literature Collections.