Nick Montfort is an American computer scientist and poet who is a professor of digital media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.

Montfort's The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017) is a computer-generated book-length poem produced by a one-page computer program. The code is included at the end of the book. Montfort has also done a complete studio recording reading The Truelist, available at PennSound.

Among Montfort's computer-generated books is #! (pronounced "shebang"), in which he "chooses the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Perl (the last of which has a documented history as a poetic medium) to create impressions of an ideal—machines based on the rules of language." The book includes a Python version of "Taroko Gorge," which is available online in JavaScript and has been modified by many authors. Some of these "remixes" are collected in The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 3.

Montfort collaborated with six others on 2x6, a book published by Les Figues that includes six short programs and some of the short narrative poems these generate in English, Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, and Russian. This project has also been exhibited and is available online on the Web. Montfort's Autopia, which assembles short sentences from the names of automobiles, is another project that also appears as a printed book (published by Troll Thread), a gallery installation, and a web page. These and other of his computer-generated books have been considered conceptual writing.

Several of Montfort's printed computer-generated books were generated with programs he wrote during National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo). These include three self-published books, Hard West Turn (2018 Edition), Megawatt, and World Clock, written during the first NaNoGenMo in 2014. Translations of two of these were published by presses in Europe: World Clock was published in Polish translation by ha!art, and Megawatt in German translation by Frohmann.

Montfort is the founder and series editor of Using Electricity, a series of computer-generated books published by Counterpath.

In November 2019 Montfort announced "Nano-NaNoGenMo," calling for short computer programs within that year's National Novel Generation Month. His request was that people write programs of 256 characters or less to generate novels of 50,000 words or more. He contributed several such programs himself, as did several others.

Montfort's poetry, in addition to computer-generated books and projects, includes digital poems that are collaborations with others. He, Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul wrote The Deletionist, a system for generating erasure poetry from any page on the web. With Stephanie Strickland he wrote Sea and Spar Between, a generator of about 225 trillion stanzas arranged in a grid and combining language from Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Emily Dickinson's poems. Montfort and William Gillespie wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story, a 2002-word narrative palindrome published in 2002 in print and on the web.