FRANNY CHOI

(Very Long) Bio

Franny Choi (they/she) is the author of 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). Their debut essay collection, We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg, is forthcoming in October 2026 from Ecco Press.

Franny was born in Minneapolis to two nerdy Virgos from South Korea. 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 Providence Poetry Slam and involved in local organizing for police abolition and immigrant rights. In 2012, they joined with fellow artists Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, and Aaron Samuels to found the Dark Noise Collective. Franny continued their studies at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where they received an MFA in Poetry.

Franny’s second book, Soft Science, won the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry and 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. Their third collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Maya Angelous Book Award. It was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2022,” NPR's 2022 “Books We Love,” and Boston Globe's “Best Books of 2022.” Alongside Terisa Siagatonu, Noʻu Revilla, and Bao Phi, Franny also co-edited the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books, 2024).

In addition to outlets such as the Paris Review and the Atlantic, Franny’s work has been featured in Ms. Magazine, NPR’s All Things Considered, 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, adapted for gallery exhibits, and translated into Korean, French, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Turkish, and Italian. They were a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University’s Lewis Center, and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fellow. They also once won a TV in a Korean church picnic raffle.

A seasoned performer, Franny was a finalist in numerous national slam competitions and have presented their work in schools, conferences, theaters, bars, and coffeeshops with very loud blenders across the country. As a teaching artist, Franny has taught students of all ages, including through organizations like Project VOICE and InsideOut Literary Arts Project. A Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the VONA Workshop, they founded Brew & Forge, a project to amplify the collective power of writers to help build grassroots movements.  For five seasons, they co-hosted the Poetry Foundation podcast VS alongside Danez Smith.

Franny is currently Faculty in Literature at Bennington College. They live in Greenfield, MA with their partner (the poet Cameron Awkward-Rich) and two insane cats (Gertie and June). They are represented by Annie Hwang at Ayesha Pande Literary and by Leslie Shipman at the Shipman Agency for booking. They are a shockingly incompetent baker.