Electro Magnetic Poetry was my first experiment with the Java programming language from Sun Microsystems, and was written in September of 1995. It is an interactive Web application that allows the user to drag and drop custom poems from a collection of words. I have made the source code available to demonstrate graphics techniques to achieve smooth drag and drop in Java, and anyone who wishes to do so is free to copy it. This applet was inspired by the Magnetic Poetry Kit by Dave Kapell, an artful collection of refridgerator magnets.

Maria Winslow has a background in computer science from the University of North Carolina, and founded an Internet software company, Prominence Dot Com, in 1995. She is among a core group of early Java developers, and is currently co-authoring two books on Java for Prentice-Hall.