Deena Larsen

Deena Larsen (born 1964) is an American new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Education In 1986, Larsen received her BA in English and Logic from the University of Northern Colorado. Her undergraduate thesis, Nansense Ya Snorsted: A logical look at nonsense, received the university's 1986 Best Thesis Award. In 1991, after spending time in San Francisco and Japan, she returned to Colorado and earned her MA in English from the University of Colorado where she wrote one of the first MA theses on hypertext, titled Hypertext and Hyperpossibilities. Larsen's experimentation with literary possibilities in new digital media has led to her work being frequently analysed and cited by scholars and critics, with works like "Carving in Possibilities" (2001) being called "canonical".

Larsen has led numerous writers workshops—either online, at conferences, or universities— on the subject of hypertext, and has played a vital role in organising the electronic literature community. She hosted Hypertext Writers' Workshops at ACM Hypertext conferences in the 1990s and hosted the Electronic Literature Organization online chats on electronic literature from 2000 to 2005. In 2012, Larsen wrote a free textbook called Fun da mentals which serves as an introduction to the field of electronic literature.

Deena Larsen has Multiple Hereditary Exostoses, and wrote a work, Embodying my Mother's Bones about her disability.

As of 2022, Larsen serves on the Literary Advisory Board for the Electronic Literature Organization. From 2023-24, she was artist-in-residence at the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University at Vancouver. She has also been a board member for trAce and is a past member of the board of directors for the ELO. The work explores the lives of women in a Colorado mountain town in the 19th century. Larsen's admiration for Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology inspired her to create her own world that followed connections similar to those experienced by readers of Master's book experienced. Written in Hypercard, Marble Springs includes a collection of poems for the reader to explore and discover the identity of the author behind each poem. This means that closure is built in, enabling "readers to pause in their reading or leave it completely".

Her second work, Samplers, Eastgate Systems (1997), Samplers explores allows the reader to explore different narratives and stories through hypertext. Eastgate Systems Inc. noted Larsen's work as "Finely written and intricately structured, Samplers breaks new ground for short hypertext fiction."

Selected works + This is a list of selected works by Larsen, a more comprehensive list can be seen on ELMCIP: Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. 2017 Modern Moral Fairy Tales N/A Exhibited at the ELO conference 2012 Dedicated to Larsen's partner, MaJe, this work includes two main storylines. One including a fairy tale story and the other set in an internet cafe dealing with a suppression of information from the state. Presented in 2012 Firefly Poems That Go Published online in an online journal This work of hypertext allows readers to click each stanza to reveal a different aspect of the story. President of the Electronic Literature Organization, Leonardo Flores, describes Larsen's Firefly as "a speaker going out into nature and having an aesthetic and philosophical experience." 2002 Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts Eastgate Systems, inc. Published originally on disc, CD, or DVD Presented in the form of a quilt, this work of hypertext explores narratives and point of view's from various characters in the nine different storylines. 1997