About Taper #14

Submissions for Issue #15

All are welcome to submit for possible publication in future issues, but please see the information about our reading periods and the specific calls for each issue. We plan for the information about each N+1^th issue to be included with the release of the N^th issue.

For Taper #15, we invite submissions in response to the theme “Crossroads.” Here at Taper, we find points of meeting, blurring, and parting between human and machine authorship. In various calendars, the 15th day is the midpoint of the month and often marks a ritual point of transition, as seen in holidays including Passover, the Lantern Festival, and Mid-Sha'ban. In Latin American cultures, the quinceañera celebrates the threshold between childhood and adulthood. The 15th card in the tarot’s Major Arcana is the Devil, the gatekeeper of the Underworld who draws the binary against “God” and “good.” In the United States, the Fifteenth Amendment promises the right to vote regardless of race, yet has been shaped by forces that guard this gate closely, restricting access through devious tactics like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and strategic disenfranchisement. Today, we navigate increasing censorship, digital surveillance, and the weaponization of language, media, and computation. For issue #15, we invite submissions that play with(in) the thresholds, transitions, and border crossings, standing between old worlds and new ones in the waiting. In these intersections, sometimes the devil appears, between day and night, to challenge the traveller to a fiddle-off.

Submission Details

Download our template in a zip file so that you can edit it. After you have it and have unzipped it, edit only two parts of the file: the long comment at the top, which will hold your title, your name, and a creative statement from you, and the very end of the file, where your tiny computational poem is to be placed.
All code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be placed between the template’s closing header tag (</header>) and the closing body tag (</body>), must be valid HTML5, and must fit within 2KB (2048 bytes).
After completing your work, please use the W3C validator to check for warnings and errors. Identifying these errors is essential to ensure the piece functions correctly across different browsers and continues to work well over time. Features that are supported across browsers may be accepted even if they result in a warning, but there is value in getting work to validate. Although standard compression and minification can make the source code of many Taper works difficult to understand, we must establish limits on the code's complexity and (lack of) legibility. Consequently, we won’t publish pieces that use exec or regex eval functions.
Submissions should not use any external libraries or APIs, nor link to any external resources, including fonts. This is so that pages will be self-contained following Taper’s vision. It also has the practical purpose of allowing all of Taper’s work to be viewed without a network connection, for instance, in a gallery setting.
Please follow the spirit of the constraints and avoid bypassing the size limit through techniques such as parsing the comment section to inject assets or content into the code. When in doubt, please reference prior issues and works to see what we have published in the past. This is also helpful when questions arise regarding use of the template.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #14, you agree that, if we accept your work, we may release it, copyright by you, under this same short all-permissive license. Since you are submitting the work to us in the provided template, this will be part of your submission.

Timeline

Submissions for this issue will be accepted until August 15, 2025 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #15 will be published in Fall 2025. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite rolling submissions from those interested in participating at crossroads@badquar.to. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML files (up to five per author will be considered). You should then receive an email acknowledging our receipt of your work within a few days.

Kyle Booten (“Hi-Volta Sonnet Gym”) is the author of Gyms (dispersed holdings, 2025), a book that documents his writerly interactions with nine different algorithmic “word gyms” that—much in the spirit of the one featured in this issue of Taper—help him to strain and strengthen his poetic faculties. With Katy Ilonka Gero, he edits Ensemble Park: A Journal of Human+Computer Writing. More at kylebooten.me.

Alex Calderwood (“A Prism”, “Ways of Knowing”) is a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, studying language arts, digital poetry, games, theory, and creative programming. He can be found online at nonsens.ing and @xenoscope.bsky.social and offline somewhere between redwoods and the ocean.

John Domenico Calvelli (“Adulting”) is an experimental maker of digital things, and a teacher of those who want to do similarly. He currently is an assistant professor in game design and development at Long Island University, and runs his own studio called pklwrks LLC. It’s named as such because his mom called him pickle growing up. He can be found at jdcalvelli.itch.io, tilde.town/~vel, and pklwrks.dev.

John Cayley (“One Bound One Naught [Fourteen]”) is a maker and theorist of language art in programmable media, and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Grammalepsy (2018), Image Generation: augmented and reconfigured (2023) His main site is programmatology.com and see nllf.net.

Kavi Duvvoori is a writer and graduate worker in UWaterloo, on the Haldimand tract. Their interests include experimental and constrained literature, birds, borders, speculative fiction, lists, linguistics, the limits of language, math, queer failure, worldbuilding, avoiding the enclosure of language itself, sauteing, and maps. See titleduntitled.name.

Aleyshka Esteves Quintana (“Biweekly”) is a teacher and freelancer. Visit her site: alienliterature.com.

Leonardo Flores (“Consequences”) is a cyborg programmer, when he isn’t busy being an academic administrator, educator, editor, and scholar. Hecho en Puerto Rico. Learn more about his work in leonardoflores.net.

Katy Ilonka Gero (“Every Sonnet Must Rot (Death, Be Not Proud)”) is a writer and scientist. She’s become very interested in how language decays and reshapes with time. Her first book of poetry, The Anxiety of Conception, re-orders the poems with every printing and is available for order from Nothing to Say Press. Starting in July 2025, she’ll be returning to Sydney, Australia to start a faculty position at the University of Sydney.

Lora Hawkins (“Erosion of the 14th”) is an assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University. Her work has been published in English Journal, WhirlyBird Press's Anthology of Kansas City Writers, and Helicon 9th's In the Black and in the Red. She has taught for 16 years and earned degrees from Columbia, Brown, and Warren Wilson.

Claude Heiland-Allen (“Seize it With Both Hands”) has been using and writing free/libre open source software for artistic purposes for two decades, inspired by maths and science. Online at mathr.co.uk, offline in London, UK.

s. hickory (“monologue of a ghost NPC”, “night train”) is a student.

Joses Ho (“Moonshot Sonnet 2.0”) is a poet, pro-wrestler and scientist. As tech sorcerer for SingPoWriMo, he archives and visualises the poetry posted. Joses also has interests in creative computing and generative text. His pamphlets Dogma and Out of These Mouths were both shortlisted for Paper Jam open calls in 2024 and 2025, and his manuscript Moving Downwards in a Straight Line was selected for Manuscript Bootcamp (organised by Sing Lit Station) in 2019. He is also a pro-wrestler and ring announcer with GrappleMax. See www.josesho.com/resume.

IFcoltransG (“Lettersize Sonnetling”) learnt computational art by golfing Python and building esoteric coding languages. Their poetry explores neuroqueer forms and structures, to play with distance. They are a member of the Cryptic Conservatory story-game coöp, and they live in the city that made them. Encounter their follies at ifcoltransg.name.

Chris Joseph (“Logic's Lament”) is a British/Canadian writer and artist who works primarily with electronic text, sound, and image. His past projects include the digital fiction series Inanimate Alice; Animalamina, a collection of interactive multimedia poetry for children; and The Breathing Wall, a novel that responds to the reader’s rate of breathing. See chrisjoseph.org.

Jonah Lubin (“Sonnet Hero”) is a PhD student in CompLit at Harvard.

Ϻaᴚ༄ (“1: Rua Vinícius de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro, BR”, “2: Fidelity Sonnet”, “3: Afro-Sambas”) is a Brazilian artist and technologist. Always around thinking about language, the beach and machines. Believes in cosmopoetic-artisanal practices for the creation of artistic objects with hardware and software. Works as a software engineer for and has a degree in literature and linguistics. See: teimar.com.

Vinicius Marquet (“la máquina de esperanzas o golem místico”) is a designer who draws systems to experiment with life. He is currently part of the Electronic Literature Workshop at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a hands-on practical workshop for humanists who write code.

Jen Nesbitt (“Decay of Words”) is a writer, coder, and visual tinkerer exploring the intersection of language, memory, and machine. Her work often takes the form of browser-based poems, generative art, and creative tools that invite interaction, chance, and decay. She builds collaborative experiences that blur the line between text and code, emotion and logic – seeking beauty in systems and glitches alike.

Vivien Ngo (“14 String”, “Smile Lines”) is an artist and coder who works in news. She lives in New York City. You can find her online at vivien.garden.

Agustin Rosa is an artist, writer and editor from Rosario, Argentina. His work explores speculative storytelling, digital interfaces as well as traditional book- and object-making techniques. He is the editor-in-chief of Dead Alive Press, a press and online space that serves as a platform for experimental artists working at the intersection of technology and storytelling. He is one of the founders of Sleepwalker Collective, a DIY curation space serving local Baltimore artists. He is an alumni of School for Poetic Computation and has earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an M.F.A. in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. He is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland. You can see more work at rosa-studio.com/.

Jon Stone (“The Whisky Shop”) is the author of Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games (DeGruyter, 2022). He's a senior lecturer in creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, and has also published School of Forgery (Salt, 2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Poems Are Toys (And Toys are Good For You) (Calque, 2023) and (as co-editor) Roll Again: A Book of Games to Play (Sidekick Books, 2022). For further info: www.gojonstonego.com.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“Field Sonata”) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, witch, naturalist, and creative coder based in San Francisco, California. For more signs of life, see shewolfe.co and @wolfchirp.

Christine Wilks (“The Vowel Carries the Tone”) is a writer, artist, developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives. Her recent work, Voices, an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy, was short-listed for the New Media Writing Prize 2023. Her previous creative work has won awards and is published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, and has been presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. She has a practice-based PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University. See her work at crissxross.net.

Mark Wolff (“DeepSeek Sonnets”) is a professor of French and Global Studies and the chair of the Modern Languages department at Hartwick College (Oneonta, New York, USA). His research explores the use of computational tools for natural language processing to generate literary texts. See markwolff.name.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“14 Year Old Boy Online Argument Simulator”) won the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards’ Digital Literature Prize, 2019 Robert Coover Award for a work of Electronic Literature (2nd prize), and 2021 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. He has been shortlisted for multiple other literary prizes, and published in various academic and creative journals. He is the recipient of a Queensland writing fellowship, two Creative Australia grants, and a JSPS Kakenhi grant. He has a PhD (comparative literature) from Murdoch University and a master’s (creative writing) from the University of Edinburgh, and taught creative writing at Tsinghua and Nagoya University. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Bergen. See davidthomashenrywright.com.