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ARRAS Brian Kim Stefans

About

Brian Kim Stefans

Brian Kim Stefans is an American poet, digital artist, critic, translator, editor, and web designer. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he studied literature at Bard College and the CUNY Graduate Center before receiving an MFA in Electronic Writing from Brown University. He taught at Brown and Richard Stockton College of New Jersey before joining UCLA in 2008. He is Professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches poetry, creative writing, electronic literature, experimental fiction, media studies, and Los Angeles literary history.

Stefans’s poetry combines lyric and procedural writing with collage, satire, typography, popular culture, and digital media. His poem “They’re Putting a New Door In” was selected by Lyn Hejinian for The Best American Poetry 2004. Other poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Callaloo, Fence, and numerous anthologies and international publications. His work has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish. His next collection, These Poems Struggle to Be Direct, is under contract with Antiphony Press.

His critical books include Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews, and Word Toys: Poetry and Technics. Word Toys, which considers poems, artists’ books, programmed texts, and other literary objects as forms of technology, received the University of Alabama Press’s 2015 Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature. Stefans has also published extensively on experimental poetry, electronic literature, Asian American writing, conceptual art, and Los Angeles culture. His translation Festivals of Patience presents the verse poems of Arthur Rimbaud in English while retaining the meters and, where possible, rhyme patterns of the French originals.

Stefans began programming as a child and later worked professionally in web production for NYU’s Stern School of Business, Fodor’s Travel, and the CUNY Graduate Center. He founded Arras as a print poetry journal in the mid-1990s and moved it online in 1998. Arras subsequently developed into a site for digital poetry, criticism, independent publishing, web design, teaching projects, and literary archives. Its projects have included the antiwar collection Circulars, the /ubu series of experimental PDF books, the Los Angeles Telephone Book, and Scavenged Luxury, an archive of Los Angeles post-punk, art rock, and power pop.

He is particularly known for the digital works The Dreamlife of Letters and Star Wars, One Letter at a Time, both included in the first Electronic Literature Collection. The Dreamlife of Letters was added to the Rhizome ArtBase and has been exhibited and studied internationally. Other digital works include Kluge: A Meditation, Flash Polaroids, The Truth Interview, and Suicide in an Airplane (1919). In 2011, Stefans co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 with Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, and Rita Raley.

His recent work combines digital scholarship, archival recovery, and artificial intelligence. Beauty Face: A Poem was created through sustained collaboration with a large language model and accompanied by generated images. Versuche (Tries) gathers previously uncollected early poems, while Remote Parsee restores and expands his writings on Asian American literature. His continuing project Extremes and Moderations recovers neglected writers and publications from the history of Los Angeles poetry.

In 2025 and 2026, Stefans developed a computational method for reconstructing large or damaged literary archives as designed “reading editions.” This work produced 242 monthly editions of the University at Buffalo Poetics listserv, together with single-author and thematic collections. He also completed digital reconstructions of all 70 surviving issues of Trace, the complete 67-number run of Lyric West, 89 issues of Land of Sunshine, and 119 issues of Out West.

Print books

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