All of us in the Electronic Literature Lab are very excited to be dedicating our Reading Room to Marjorie C. Luesebrink next Wednesday (July 23, 2025). The event starts at 1 p.m. PDT and will be recorded so that it can be accessed on the lab’s Vimeo account. We are flying her frequent collaborator and close friend, the award-winning poet Stephanie Strickland, to the lab for the event so that she can perform Margie’s hypertext novel, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day. The video of this reading will be added to Margie’s collection in The NEXT and on Vimeo.
Known to her friends as “Margie” and to the reading public as “M. D. Coverley,” this born-digital artist did much to shape our field and guide so many of us during her long career. Margie served as the organization’s first Vice-President and then, later, its second President. It was Margie and Kate Hayles who moved the ELO to UCLA in the early 2000s in order to provide the financial support it needed following the dot.com crash. Along with publishing 30 born-digital works, she co-edited, along with Carolyn Guertin, Talan Memmot, and Hayles, the Progressive Dinner Party, a collection of 39 works by women artists selected by Guertin. Margie and Stephanie were both instrumental in supporting Grigar’s idea to build a repository of born-digital literature, art, and games that resulted in The NEXT and was one of the first artists to deposit her works in it. In 2022 she, along with Hayles and Grigar, provided financial support for an Electronic Literature Lab Graduate & Post-Doctoral Fellowship to fund a PhD student from UC Santa Cruz to work in the lab remotely to create metadata for The NEXT.
Margie visited ELL several times in the last decade to conduct Traversals of her work and prepare for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), which she co-taught with Davin Heckman and Grigar. Grigar had long considered Margie her mentor during their many years together on the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Board of Directors and leaned on her heavily when Grigar served as the organization’s President, herself, from 2013-2019.
It was Grigar’s idea to create the ELO’s Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award in 2016 during Grigar’s presidency so that she could honor Margie for her contributions to the field. Grigar is now happy to honor Margie at ELL for her contributions to her life.