Judy Malloy
Judy Malloy, born Judith Ann Powers on January 9, 1942, in Boston, is an American poet and artist who helped shape online literature. Her work mixes hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. In 1986 she created Uncle Roger, one of the first online interactive fictions where readers could choose different paths. It started as a BASIC program, later ran on floppy disks, and was published on the web in 1995. The Wall Street Journal called it the start of a new art form.
Malloy wrote many other pioneering pieces, including Penelope, Brown House Kitchen (an online narrative made at Xerox PARC), l0ve0ne, and The Yellow Bowl. She teamed with Cathy Marshall on Forward/Anywhere, a hypernarrative made from their email exchanges, and wrote about their experience in Wired Women.
Beyond creating art, Malloy has edited and led important projects and journals. She coordinated FineArt Forum, helped run Leonardo Electronic News, and edited Arts Wire and the online resource content | code | process. Her book Women, Art & Technology (MIT Press, 2003) highlights how women have shaped new media.
Her later work includes a 2010 new media poetry trilogy, Paths of Memory and Painting, and she edited Social Media Archeology and Poetics (MIT Press, 2016). Malloy has held academic roles at Rutgers-Camden and Princeton University. Her work has been shown worldwide, and her papers are collected by Duke University. She studied literature at Middlebury College and worked at the Library of Congress and as a NASA contractor, later living in Berkeley in the 1970s, where she created artist’s books.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 07:23 (CET).