A poet, media scholar, and former network engineer, Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, and a book on digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), described by The New Yorker as "mesmerizing... absorbing [in] its playful speculations."