Biography.

Saramanda Swigart is thrilled to have added creative and academic writing to her years of writing ad copy and corporate literature and doing graphic design. She has lived and worked in Italy, New York, San Francisco, and Dubai. She has an MFA from Columbia University, with a supplementary degree in literary translation, and an MA in literature with a game studies concentration from San Francisco State University. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Azure, Superstition Review, Arkana, Expanded Field, The Saranac Review, and Glassworks, to name a few. See a full list of publications here. Her short story "The Earth Falls to the Apple" was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. While teaching English at City College of San Francisco, she contributed to How Arguments Work, an open source rhetoric textbook that was released by LibreTexts in 2021, and designed the course “Video Games and Literature,” which was offered for the first time in 2022. At SF State she taught “Video Games, Politics, and the State” for the Political Science department. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media with a concentration in Computational Media. She teaches “Video Games as Visual Culture” at UCSC.

Her graduate work focuses on video games as transmitters of ideology; reflectors of the anxieties and desires that thrum within cultures; and critique-able but increasingly nuanced and artistic conveyors of narratives that rival that of literature and cinema. In many cases, she argues, games go beyond books and film by leveraging the complex rhetorical substrates of interactive stories. She regularly presents at academic conferences on such topics as disability and games, queer theory and games, fan studies, games and psychology, and countergaming. See her academic work here.

She still does graphic design on a limited basis. Check out her design portfolio here if you are interested in her services or would like the contact information of similar designers.