FRANNY CHOI

Franny Choi is the author of several books, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco Books 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Their poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is currently Faculty in Literature at Bennington College and the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.

After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies, Franny developed their writing practice in community with artists and activists in Providence, Rhode Island, where they were a Co-Director of the award-winning Providence Poetry Slam. In 2012, she joined with fellow artists Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, and Aaron Samuels to found the Dark Noise Collective. She continued her studies at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she received an MFA in Poetry and a postgraduate Zell Fellowship.

Soft Science was named as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Massachusetts Book Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and a Believer Book Award. Franny’s third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and was named one of Time's “100 Must-Read Books of 2022,” NPR's 2022 “Books We Love,” and Boston Globe's “Best Books of 2022.” They are at work on two forthcoming books: an essay collection about race, robots, and techno-Orientalism (under contract with Ecco) and an anthology, We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word, co-edited with Terisa Siagatonu, No‘u Revilla, and Bao Phi.

In addition to outlets such as the Paris Review and the Atlantic, Franny’s work has also been featured in Ms. Magazine, NPR’s All Things Considered, PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular series, the Angry Asian Man blog, and The Abolitionist, a newspaper that distributes to over 7,000 incarcerated readers. Their poems have been set to music by composers, included in several gallery exhibits, and translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, and Turkish. In 2020, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts awarded Franny the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize.

A seasoned performer, Franny was a finalist in numerous competitions including the National Poetry Slam, the Individual World Poetry Slam, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam. They have performed their work in schools, conferences, theaters, and bars across the country. As a teaching artist, Franny has taught students of all ages and levels of experience, both in formal classroom settings and through organizations like Project VOICE and InsideOut Literary Arts Project. A Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the VONA Workshop, she founded Brew & Forge, a project to amplify the collective power of writers to help build grassroots movements.  As a curator, they have worked with organizations including Split This Rock and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to highlight the voices of queer and trans poets of Asian/Pacific diasporas. For five seasons, she co-hosted the Poetry Foundation podcast VS alongside Danez Smith.

Franny has also authored two plays: Mask Dances, which was produced as part of the 2011 Writing is Live Festival in Providence, RI, and Family Style, which was given several staged readings in Chicago in 2017 and won a Hopwood Award for Drama at the University of Michigan. She was formerly the Senior Editor of News, Politics, and Social Justice at Hyphen Magazine and is now Faculty in Literature at Bennington College. They are also the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA (even though they technically live in Greenfield).

Franny is represented by Annie Hwang at Ayesha Pande Literary and by Leslie Shipman at the Shipman Agency for booking.