Brian Kim Stefans


Brian Kim Stefans is an American poet.
He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey and, earned a bachelor's degree from Bard College and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from Brown University after studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
His books of poetry include "Viva Miscegenation”: New Writing', Kluge: A Meditation and other works, What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers, Angry Penguins, Gulf and Free Space Comix. Along with several chapbooks of poetry, his other books include Before Starting Over: Selected Interviews and Essays 1994-2005 and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics which includes experimental essays on the role of algorithm in poetry and culture.
A resident of New York from 1992-2005, Stefans was an active participant in the poetry culture of the city as an editor and organizer, publishing numerous reviews in outlets such as Publishers Weekly, The Boston Review, St. Mark's Poetry Project newsletter, Shark, Rain Taxi, Verse, Tripwire and other small journals in the United States and abroad.
Among other web activities, he created arras.net in 1998, a site devoted to new media poetry and poetics where his interactive art and digital poems such as "Suicide in an Airplane," “Star Wars,” “The Dreamlife of Letters” and “Kluge: A Meditation” can be found. He is also a video artist, graphic designer and publisher of Arras Book, freely downloadable at arras.
Recent critical writing include “Conceptual Writing: The L.A. Brand” published by Area Sneaks Sheets, the series “Third Hand Plays” for the website of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art concerning electronic literature, and "Terrible Engines: A Speculative Turn in Recent Poetry and Fiction” that inaugurates his recent interest in applying concepts from recent Continental philosophy to new forms of literature. Writing on Asian American art and literature include “Remote Parsee: Asian American Poetry Since 1970” and “Miscegenated Scripts: A Theory of Asian American New Media.”
Stefans's blog is Free Space Comix. He presently lives in Hollywood and is an of poetry, new media and screenplay studies in the English department of UCLA.