Steve Tomasula

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels Ascension: A Novel, The Book of Portraiture (FC2); VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press), an acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution; TOC: A New-Media Novel (winner of the Mary Shelly Award for Excellence in Fiction and the E-Lit Best Book of the Year Award); and IN&OZ (University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Once Human: Stories (shortlisted for an IndiFab Best Book of the Year Award). He is the editor of Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E-, and Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art. Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds--from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports--Tomasula's writing has been called a 'reinvention of the novel,' combining an 'attention to society in the tradition of Orwell, attention to language in the tradition of Beckett, and the humor of a Coover or Pynchon.' His writing often crosses visual, as well as written genres, drawing on science and the arts to take up themes of how we represent what we think we know, and how these representations shape our lives. His short fiction has been published widely in anthologies and periodicals including McSweeney's, BOMB, The Ninth Letter, and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre. Recent essays on body art, literature and culture can be found in Data Made Flesh (Routledge), Musing the Mosaic (SUNY), Leonardo (M.I.T.), The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, and numerous magazines both here and in Europe. His fiction is also the subject of cultural and literary studies, including books by David Banash, Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction; Torsa Ghosal, Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think; Mary Holland, Succeeding Postmodernism: Signifying Families in Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Fiction; and Flore Chevaillier, Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers; and her The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame. Homepage at: www.stevetomasula.com