Allison Parrish is an American

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

, creative coder, and

game designer Game design is the process of creating and shaping the mechanics, systems, rules, and gameplay of a game. Game design processes apply to board games, card games, dice games, casino games, role-playing games, sports, Wargame (video games), war ga ...

, notable as one of the most prominent early makers of creative, literary

Twitter bot A Twitter bot or an X bot is a type of software bot that controls a Twitter/X account via the Twitter API. The social bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, retweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messagin ...

s. She was named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by ''

The Village Voice ''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture publication based in Greenwich Village, New York City, known for being the country's first Alternative newspaper, alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf (publisher), Dan Wolf, ...

'' in 2016. Parrish has produced a textbook introduction to creative coding in Python, more specifically Processing.py. Parrish holds a BA in Linguistics from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

, and a Master of Professional Studies from the

Interactive Telecommunications Program The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic, and media arts school of New York University. Founded on August 17, 1965, as the School of the Arts at New York University, Tisch ...

(ITP),

NYU New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a non-denominational all-male institutio ...

. She has been a Writer-in-Residence in the English Department of

Fordham University Fordham University is a Private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit research university in New York City, United States. Established in 1841, it is named after the Fordham, Bronx, Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx in which its origina ...

, 2014–16, and an Assistant Arts Professor at the ITP since 2016.

Selected works

* A conceptual poetic Twitter bot launched 2007 and later published as a book: This bot tweeted out an alphabetized list of about 100,000 words, one every 30 minutes. Instead of a definition, the entry for that word contains the social media analytics of that tweet. @everyword was one of the first bots to have an ultimate telos, or aim, as well as a clear structure, and a metanarrative as the reactions to each word were substituted for a definition and use of the word. * ''Frankenstein-Genesis'', word vectorization, a machine-readable representation mixes two paragraphs from "Frankenstein" and the Bible. * With collaborators Adam Simon and Tim Szetela. * The book uses an algorithm to draw lines between similar linguistic elements of public domain poetry.

Awards

Allison Parrish won The Maverick Award from the

Electronic Literature Organization The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of a ...

in 2024.

References

External links

* Allison Parrish's website Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American poets American software engineers People from Bountiful, Utah University of California, Berkeley alumni New York University alumni Living people American video game designers American electronic literature writers Women video game designers 21st-century American women writers American women poets {{US-writer-stub