J. R. Carpenter facts for kids

J. R. Carpenter (born in 1972) is a British-Canadian artist and writer. She also does research. She works with performance, printed books, and digital art.

She was born in Nova Scotia, Canada. She lived in Montreal for many years. In 2010, she moved to England and became a British citizen in 2019. Today, she lives in Southampton, England.

Learning and Degrees

Carpenter studied Life Drawing and Anatomy in New York in 1988. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree from Concordia University in Montreal in 1995. Her main subjects were Fibres and Sculpture.

In 2015, she earned a PhD from University of the Arts London. Her research looked at how stories connect to places, especially across the Atlantic Ocean. She explored how digital literature and location-based stories can help us understand identity.

Her Work and Career

J. R. Carpenter has worked in many areas of art. These include visual arts, media arts, and writing. She has worked with public groups and universities.

From 2006 to 2011, she was the President of the Board of Directors for OBORO. This is an artist-run gallery and new media lab in Montreal. She also taught writing and digital literature at The Banff Centre from 2010 to 2014.

In 2015, she received a special fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies. This is part of the British Library in London. In 2019, she had another fellowship at the Moore Institute in Ireland. She was also a Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta from 2020 to 2021. In 2022, she was a Writer in Residence for the StreeLife project at the University of York.

Since June 2022, she has been a research fellow at Winchester School of Art. She is working on a project called "Weather Reports." This project studies wind as a model, media, and experience.

Her Writing

Carpenter writes about many topics. These include places, moving from one place to another, textile art, and digital literature. She also writes about the history of the internet.

Her essays, art reviews, poems, and short stories have been shared widely. They have been on CBC Radio and translated into other languages. Her work has appeared in many magazines and books in Canada, the US, and the UK. Some of these include Oxford Poetry and Arc Poetry Magazine.

Digital Stories and Art

J. R. Carpenter has been creating electronic texts since 1993. Her art combines live performance, printed works, and digital media. She made her first web-based artwork in 1995.

Her digital works are known around the world. They have been shown in festivals, galleries, and museums. These include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

• Her work In Absentia uses a Google Map of Montreal. It shows how much of our lives cannot be easily put onto maps.
• The Broadside of a Yarn was a special project for an exhibition in Edinburgh in 2012.
• Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl was created in 2012.
• She also made short stories using computer code. One example is Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR.
• Her web-based work, The Gathering Cloud, was made for a digital arts festival in 2016. This work explores ideas about cloud computing.
• Her web-app, This is a Picture of Wind, is like a weather phone for mobile devices. A printed book version of this work was published in 2020.
• Her sound work and web app, An Island of Sound, was shown at the British Library in 2023.

Her digital art is also part of important collections. These include the Electronic Literature Collection.

Books She Has Written

Carpenter's first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published in Montreal in 2008.

Her second book, GENERATION[S], came out in 2010. It is a collection of stories made with computer code.

In 2017, a print book based on her web work, The Gathering Cloud, was published. Critics have praised this book. One critic said it "represents the kind of rewarding hybridity in writing and concepts." Another said it "founds a whole new discipline."

In 2018, her first poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, was published. One reviewer called it "a bravura piece of writing." Another said it was "a poetic endeavour completely unlike any other."

Her second poetry collection, This is a Picture of Wind, was published in 2020. This book explores how language tries to describe something like wind, which we can only feel. The Guardian newspaper listed it as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2020.

Her fourth collection, Measures of Weather, was published in 2025. A reviewer called it a "blustery yet brilliant fourth collection." They also praised its "clever use of concrete poetry."

Awards and Recognition

J. R. Carpenter has won several awards for her writing and digital art.

In 2003, she won the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition for "Precipice." She won it again in 2005 for "Air Holes."

In 2008, she won the Quebec Writers' Federation Carte Blanche Award. This was for her creative nonfiction work "Wyoming is Haunted."

In 2009, her novel Words the Dog Knows won the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book.

Her web-based work CityFish was a finalist for the New Media Writing Prize in 2012. In 2015, she won the Dot Award for Digital Literature.

She won the New Media Writing Prize in 2016 for her web-based work The Gathering Cloud. This work was also recognized in other awards.

In 2018, her web-app This is a Picture of Wind won the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition's People's Choice Award. It was also a finalist for the New Media Writing Prize in 2018.

Her poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly praised for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2018.

Her second collection This is a Picture of Wind was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021.

See also

• Electronic literature
• Internet art
• Digital poetry
• Hypertext fiction
• Interactive fiction