About Taper #16

Submissions for Issue #17

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 #17, we invite submissions in response to the theme “Prime.” Here at Taper, we are at the precipice of new beginnings while looking back on our origins. For our seventeenth issue, which will launch on our new home at taperzine.org, we welcome computationally poetic explorations with prime numbers, of which 17 is a member (as well as both a Leyland prime and Fermat prime), or works drawing from words that have “prime” as their root, denoting what is first and fundamental (e.g., primal, primordial, primate, primer). Incidentally, there are 17 elementary particles in the Standard Model of physics; the Tarot’s 17th Major Arcana card, The Star; and the 17th letter in the English and Latin alphabets, Q, which might also suggest a Prime Directive. Several of these terms also invoke cultural antecedents and origins (sometimes through a colonial gaze), pointing toward the pasts, ancestral inheritances, and philosophical traditions we revive, forget, or recombine in new arrangements. Works that engage with 17-syllable poetic forms, such as haiku or Allen Ginsberg’s “American Sentence,” are also encouraged.

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. (An exception is made for using <style> tags within your poem code; please do not modify the template's stylesheet.)
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.
While Taper has prioritized desktop display and interaction, please also check that your work is reasonably viewable on mobile and narrower screen widths.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #17, 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 17, 2026 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #17 will be published in Fall 2026. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite submissions for Taper #17 at submit@taperzine.org. 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.

Romi Banerjee (“16 anna”) is a curious cognitivist dabbling in nature-inspired sustainable tech design (romibanerjee@iitj.ac.in).

J. R. Carpenter (“F I N D I N G S”) is an artist, writer, mudlark, fossil hunter, researcher and Lecturer in Creative Practice in the School of English at University of Leeds. The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. This is a Picture of Wind was featured in the Digital Storytelling exhibition at the British Library 2023. Measures of Weather was a finalist for the Laurel Prize 2025. p a u s e. Is out now from Broken Sleep Books. See: https://luckysoap.com

Melissa Cerrillo (“cianométro”) holds a master's in Comparative Literature from UNAM and is a recipient of a PECDA Jalisco 2025 grant.

Angela Chang (“Shake & Bake”) enjoys tinkering with technology to craft shared experiences and bring people closer together. She researches how sensorial design can enhance cognition, collaboration, and presence. Chang is interested in simplifying representations of hidden or complex relationships to improve understanding and communication. People across five continents, from rural children in Ethiopia to audiences in Japan, have experienced her work. She founded TinkerStories to encourage parents to learn storytelling rituals that help with early literacy. She is a member of the MIT Trope Tank, the Berkley Cultural Council, the Friends of Dighton Rock Museum, and an alumna of the MIT Media Lab. See anjchang.com.

Leia S. Chang (“from~to”, “Options”) is an interdisciplinary artist with a habit of adopting new mediums. They oscillate between digital and tangible, aligned with material misuse and personal storytelling. Find them at leiac.me, or on ig @leia.make.

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.

Leonardo Flores (“Extreme Measures”) is a cyborg creative coder, academic administrator, educator, editor, and scholar. Hecho en Puerto Rico. Learn more about his work in leonardoflores.net.

Maitry Gami (“16 anna”) is an undergraduate engineering student interested in the ways in which games and stories work. Gami belongs to the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India.

Tonisha Guin (“16 anna”) works at the intersections of identities and spaces in Indian lived modernities and plays with minimal digital storytelling (guin.tonisha@gmail.com).

Alicia Guo (“16 Wishes”) is a computational artist, poet, and HCI researcher based in Seattle. Her responsive text installations and web-based poems invite audiences to collectively create poetic artifacts that blend physical and digital spaces. Her work has been featured in Vector Festival, Michigan Quarterly Review, Graywolf Lab, The HTML Review, and Crawlspace. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Washington on creativity support tools.

Evan Hahn (“Sixteenth of a year”) is a computer programmer. https://evanhahn.com/

Claude Heiland-Allen (“Hyperloop”) has been using and writing free/libre open source software for artistic purposes for a quarter of a century, inspired by maths and science. Online at https://mathr.co.uk, offline in Alt Empordà.

Parayush Kanphade (“Between F and 0”) is a sophomore electrical engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. He is a full-stack engineer and designer, with an interest in exploring digital literature and interactive works.

cynthia li (“glimpse”) is a writer, graduate worker, and organizer dreaming of crip futures. You can find them at erroneouswhale.pics.

Margot Machado (“rhythm = distance * urgency”) is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from the Canary Islands and the U.S. Her work explores attention, affection, and the hyperexploitation of territory and environment. She works across sound, text, and interactivity (centering listening, fiction, and participatory structures) to create intimate experiences in public spaces. Her writing, performances, and installations have appeared in spaces such as Quarterly West, Phe Festival, La Casa Encendida, and ELO Toronto. Seeing was runner-up for the 2024 Robert Coover Award, and she premiered her first play, Fácil de Matar, last year. Margot has an unhealthy obsession with crosswords and has published a few in El País.

Aia Meyer (“[SIC]”) is a software engineer based in Seattle. She loves romance and roller derby. See meyer.dev.

Shihab Mian (“hex triplets”) (she-hub me-in, he/him) is a creative technologist working primarily with visual media and creative coding. He is intrigued by the emotionality of technology and how it shapes human connection. He creates deprecated programs and intentional failings, where inefficiency, glitch, or error are embraced.

odbol (“Desperate Measures from a Dying Regime”) is a designer, engineer, artist, and musician who designs interfaces that bring the body closer to the machine, exploring the cybernetic integration of contemporary humanity. Currently he builds accessibility software for people who are blind or have low vision. Previously he built wearables, interactive virtual sculptures, and esoteric musical instruments. More works at odbol.com.

Parsa Rahimi (“Almost Nothing”) is a San Francisco-based software engineer and cinephile, driven by a passion for creating special and memorable experiences for people. Find his work at parsuli.com.

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 BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an MFA 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.

Anastasia Salter (“(un)done”) is a Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and Director of Graduate Programs for the College of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Salter is the author or co-author of ten books on digital culture and electronic literature, including most recently Undertale: Can a Game Give Hope? (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Critical Making in the Age of AI (with Emily Johnson, Amherst College Press 2025). Dr. Salter currently serves as President of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Mark Sample (“Work (16 Hour Days, 80 Hour Weeks)”) is a Professor of Film, Media, and Digital Studies at Davidson College. His teaching and research focuses on algorithmic culture, digital narrative, and interactive design, while his creative work, like Content Moderator Sim and 10 Lost Boys, harnesses the expressive power of computation in order to critique contemporary life. No Time to Discourse, his most recent digital project, is a speculative atlas of future climate disaster.

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

Atharva Waghmare (“16 anna”) is an undergraduate engineering student interested in the ways in which games and stories work. Waghmare belongs to the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India.

Christine Wilks (“Qualia Standards Visualizer”) is a writer, artist, coder and developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives. In recent years, she has specialised in creating digital fictions for international, transdisciplinary, feminist research projects. Her personal creative work has won awards, been published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, and presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. She has a PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University. See her work at https://crissxross.net.