Two approaches — traditional and innovative — to literature and storytelling have received kudos this week.
Fred Moten, a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, is one of five finalists for the prestigious National Book Award in Poetry. He was nominated for this collection of poetry titled “The Feel Trio” (Letter Machine Editions).
The National Book Foundation announced 10 nominees in each of four categories — Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature — in New York in September, and finalists were announced Oct. 15. The winners will be named on Nov. 19. The National Book Award is the nation’s highest honor in literature.
Moten is the author of “In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition,” “Hughson’s Tavern,” “B. Jenkins,” and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.” He was recognized as one of 10 New American Poets by the Poetry Society of America. He is also co-founder and co-publisher of a small literary press called Three Count Pour.
"Ice-Bound," an interactive fiction piece created by two graduate students in the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media, has won the Story/World Design Award at the 2014 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games.
"Ice-Bound" combines interactive digital technology with a printed art book to create a new kind of story involving doomed polar explorers and a self-doubting artificial intelligence. Its creators, Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe, are both graduates of the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. program and are currently working toward Ph.D. degrees in computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
The IndieCade festival is a highly competitive and influential venue for independently made computer games, according to Jim Whitehead, professor of computational media at UC Santa Cruz. The Story/World Design Award honors the special craft of revealing narratives through interactions within an imagined world which players want to inhabit and explore.
