Robert Kendall

Kendall was born and raised in Canada. He earned an MA degree from New York University, sojourned in New Jersey for ten years, and currently lives in Menlo Park, California, with his wife and two daughters. Beginning around 1990, Kendall pioneered interactive multimedia poetry, leading to a 1996 “epic” hypertext poem, A Life Set for Two. His print work, A Wandering City (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1992), won the CSU Poetry Center Prize. Kendall's printed poetry has appeared widely in magazines (including Rattapallax, Contact II, River Styx, New York Quarterly, Barrow Street, and Indiana Review), and several anthologies have included his work. He has received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship for literature and a New Forms Regional Grant Program Award.

Since 1995 he has taught hypertext poetry and fiction through the online program of the New School University in New York. His articles and essays about computer technology and computers in the arts have appeared in PC Magazine, PC Computing, and Electronic Musician, Poets & Writers Magazine, Leonardo, and Kairos, as well as an edited collection, Without Covers from Purdue University Press. He was formerly the hypertext literature editor of the SIGWEB Newsletter (published by the Association for Computing Machinery), for which he wrote a regular column. He is on the Literary Advisory Board of the Electronic Literature Organization, and he supervises the Organization's Electronic Literature Directory. He is codeveloper of Connection Muse, an adaptive hypertext authoring system for Web poetry and fiction.