Shelley Jackson (born 1963) is an American writer and artist known for her cross-genre experimental works. These include her hyperfiction Patchwork Girl (1995) and her first novel, Half Life (2006). Biography In her own words: "Shelley Jackson was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California." Here, her family ran a small women's bookstore for several years; Jackson later recalled, "I was already in love with books by then [...] and the family store just confirmed what I already suspected, that books were the most interesting and important things in the world. Of course I wanted to write them!" She graduated from Berkeley High School, and received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is self-described as a "student in the art of digression". While at Brown, Jackson was taught by electronic literature advocates Robert Coover and George Landow. During one of Landow's lectures in 1993, Jackson began drawing "a naked woman with dotted-line scars" in her notebook, an image she eventually expanded into her first hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl. Jackson later said that she never considered publishing Patchwork Girl as a print novel, explaining, A nonchronological reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl was published by Eastgate Systems in 1995 to acclaim; it became Eastgate's best-selling CD-ROM title and is now considered a groundbreaking work of hypertext fiction. "Patchwork Girl" uses tissue and scars as well as the body and the skeleton as metaphors for the juxtaposition of lexia and link. While working in a San Francisco, California bookstore, Jackson published two more hypertexts, the autobiographical My Body (1997), and The Doll Games (2001), which she wrote with her sister Pamela. In the late nineties, Jackson alternated hypertext work with writing short stories (in publications such as The Paris Review and Conjunctions) and children's books. Jackson has explained that she "completely ignored" one college professor who told her the key to success was focus, and added that "[s]ometimes this means shuttling manically between art and writing and other, more unmentionable obsessions. More and more, though, and partly because of the ease of mixing media in electronic work, I've come to see all these projects as interrelated." During this period, Jackson also did cover and interior illustrations for two short story collections by Kelly Link, Stranger Things