Poetry in the Commons: Brian Ang, Kyle Booten, Alex Saum-Pascual, and graduate students
Sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media
Thursday, April 9, 2026
4:30-6:00pm
BCNM Commons (Grimes Engineering Center B102)
We invite the electronic literature community for an informal poetry reading on the occasion of BCNM alumnus Kyle Booten's new book, Gyms (dispersed holdings, 2025). Booten will be joined by poet Brian Ang and BCNM faculty member Alexandra Saum-Pascual, and they invite graduate students who work in digital poetry to come read in a lightning round.
Update (Apr 7, 2026): We have confirmed our graduate student contributors for this event. If you have any questions, please write to BCNM Associate Director Aaron Fai (afai [at] berkeley.edu).
We also encourage all to attend Booten's lunchtime talk the next day, Friday April 10 from 12:15-1:30pm, "Writing With and Beyond AI: Fieldnotes from Computer-Mediated Poetry" co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the School of Information.
Readers
Brian Ang wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos, 2022) and is Bookstore Manager for the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. totalitycantos.net includes the complete text and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. Prose: “Assemblage Poetics”; editor: Assemblage Sampler; current poetic project: A Thousand Albums, open to the totality of music.
Kyle Booten is an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is a scholar-practitioner whose research and creative work explore the algorithmic mediation of human thinking, especially poetic thinking. His most recent book is Gyms (dispersed holdings, 2025), a book of poetry written with and against nine different algorithmic “word gyms” designed to make writing more strenuous. Booten is also the author of Salon des Fantômes: Or, Streptohormetic Prompt Engineering for the Production of a Jagged Noetic Substrate (Inside the Castle, 2024), the documentation of a weeklong philosophical and artistic salon at which he was the only non-AI participant.
Alex Saum-Pascual is a (digital) poet, and associate professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media. She is author of #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2018) and numerous articles, special issues and book chapters on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world, being featured in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Electronic Book Review among others. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from UC Berkeley's Hellman Fund, the Peder Sather Center for Advance Studies and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Her digital artwork and poetry have been exhibited in galleries and art festivals internationally and have been studied in specialized articles, monographs such as Mujeres poetas del mundo digital (2020), and Ciberfeminismos: Tecnotextualidades y transgéneros (2023), and have anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 4 (2022). Currently, she is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media, co-director of Spanish Studies at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. She is also one of the editors of the Electronic Literature series at Bloomsbury Academic Press, and part of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.