In Stephanie Strickland's cyberpoem True North, embodied experience is refracted through the specialized languages of mathematics, science, myth, and history, with the figures of Emily Dickinson and Willard Gibbs, America's first mathematical physicist, at the heart of the poem's historical section. Released on disk by Eastgate Systems, True North subsequently won a 1998 Salt Hill Hypertext Prize, and has been presented at the 1999 Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature conference at Brown University hosted by Robert Coover, at the AM98 Art and Mathematics Conference hosted by UC Berkeley, and at the 1998 MLA conference in San Francisco. Strickland will present portions of True North as well as two multimedia Web poems, one of which, "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot," won About.com's Best of the Net Poetry award.

About Stephanie Strickland

Stephanie Strickland is widely hailed as one of our most brilliant practitioners of and thinkers about cyberspace, and as one of our finest poets. She has been the recipient of a great many honors and awards for her work. True North has won three national prizes, two as a print book version and another as a hypertext. Booklist noted that particularly the poem's title sequence, "beginning with the difference between magnetic and true north, . . . launches into an exploration of the forces of love, until the metaphor links science and the heart so tightly that they are inseparable. . . . The force of [Strickland's] passion for ideas and for human connection sustains" the entirety of the poem. True North is especially rooted in women's experience. Strickland has authored many other acclaimed works including her essays on digital text, one itself a hypertext, which have appeared in the Electronic Book Review. She has been the recipient of the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and was chosen by Barbara Guest for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and,  for The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, was awarded the Brittingham Prize by the University of Wisconsin Press. A print version of the "Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot" was selected for the 1999 Boston Review Prize by Heather McHugh. Her other awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in hypertext poetry, and the Open Voice Award of the West Side YMCA. She is also the author of the highly praised book of  poems, Give the Body Back.