About

photo by Brian McConkey

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four books of poetry: Oh You Robot Saints!Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country, and The Spokes of Venus, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry), shortlisted for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems and essays have appeared inThe New Yorker, American Poetry ReviewPloughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern ReviewPoetry Ireland, Los Angeles Review of Books, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day,  The Slowdown Show, and elsewhere. Her collaborations with composers have been performed and exhibited across the country, and her short stories have been published or forthcoming such places as Catapult, Joyland, and Prairie Schooner.

Frank is the recipient of such honors as the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Meier Achievement Award, a Mississippi Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, an AWP Intro Journal Award, and fellowships from such places as the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; the Ragdale Foundation; the Writers’ Room of Boston; Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, where she has been a Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Fellow.

Frank holds an MFA from Emerson College and a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati, where she was an Elliston Poetry Fellow. She has taught widely, including as a visiting poet in the graduate program at UC Irvine, as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University, as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University, and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Memorious, Frank serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and reviews poetry for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books and LitHub. She lives outside of Chicago.

“[Frank’s book in-progress] as it interrogates with inventive specificity a group of individual histories, in this case Filipino Americans during World War II, and after, also adds an eloquent voice to world poetry (as exemplified in different ways by Rukeyser, by Nelly Sachs, by Darwish) of displacement, of an experience of exile that can be internal, of the human realities and costs of war. There is no question when reading these texts that one is being guided through these landscapes by a poet as sure in craft as in historical vision, giving the reader the pleasure of this virtuoso reach, lyricism, control, while investigating (in the poet’s own words) “the consistently manipulated dividing lines of culture and power.”

-Marilyn Hacker, judge, Poetry Society of America’s 2010 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award