Franny Choi
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Kunidman Fellow & Zell Postgraduate Fellow
at the University of Michigan! 
Wearing a crown of sonnets like a dime store tiara, Franny Choi’s cyborg cephalopod is a creature of unending amazements, unfurling tendril after tendril—some surgical, some sensual, some weaponized, some rubberized—brandishing hypodermics, vibrators, cigarettes, smartphones, or simply snapping in time to the beat...At once raw and radiant, these brilliant poems are at their most human when they assert their alienness, at their most ferocious when they dare to be vulnerable.
-Monica Youn, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award Franny Choi’s generous inventiveness transmutes the book’s violent lore into a ferocious tenderness. In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time. -Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl |
Franny Choi is a queer, Korean-American poet, playwright, teacher, organizer, pottymouth, GryffinClaw, & general overachiever. She is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) & Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation & the Helen Zell Writers Program, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center & the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, & New England Review, & her work has been featured by the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, PBS NewsHour, & Angry Asian Man.
A Kundiman Fellow & graduate of the VONA Workshop, in 2016 she founded the Brew & Forge Book Fair, a fundraising project that brings together poetry readers & writers to build capacity in social justice community organizations. Franny is the author of two plays: Mask Dances, which was produced as part of the 2011 Writing is Live Festival in Providence, RI, & Family Style, which was given several staged readings in Chicago in 2017. Aside from writing and teaching, Franny is a Senior News Editor for Hyphen Magazine & hosts the Poetry Foundation podcast VS along with fellow poet Danez Smith. A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Franny is currently a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan & a Citywide Poets Site Leader at Detroit School of Arts. She lives in Hamtramck, MI with some very resilient plants. Twitter: @fannychoir Instagram: @fancyrhino 
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Key Topics
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Whether tracking the adventures of the ‘cyborg’ or eavesdropping on conversations between sisters, it’s all the same world. These striking poems ring through with a singular voice, creating a society that helps us understand our own. When you open a book of poems, ‘isn’t that what you came to see?’ Choi builds a world not only of striking beauty and lucid politics, but also, more importantly, with love. -A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineste In her invention of form, engagement with theory and genre, and truly empathetic approach to identity, Choi offers the reader a poetry of imagination; writing which builds new possibilities for itself, even as it remains relevant to contemporary conversations around poetry and body. It’s a brilliant read. -Up the Staircase Quarterly |