photograph by Chris Lake

Gina Franco received a B.A. from Smith College and an M.F.A. in poetry writing from Cornell University where she also completed work towards her Ph.D. Her collection of poems, The Keepsake Storm, was published by the University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol Latina/o Literary Series in 2004. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including Black Warrior Review, BorderSenses, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Fence, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Reveiw, Tuesday; an Art Project, Zone 3, A Best of Fence: the First Nine Years, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. Her poetry has been nominated for and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry and the Defined Providence Poetry Book Prize, and her collection of poems was recently recognized in The New York Times Book Review Blog among books that Junot Diaz says left him "floored." Her teaching and research interests include 18th & 19th century British literature, Modern & contemporary poetry and poetry translation, Latino writing, religion and literature, and literary theory. She currently serves as acquiring art editor of Pilgrimage Magazine and as a contributing editor to Latino Poetry Review. She divides her dwelling space between Galesburg, Illinois, where she teaches English and creative writing at Knox College, the Arizona desert where she grew up, and the Southwest Texas/Mexican border, her mother's home.
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 photo by poet/photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis
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"The first line of Gina Franco's marvelous first book asks 'You want real?' She then proceeds to give us real and beyond real: something that is nothing less than grave and beautiful and terrifying, a volume so unnerving and sublime it defies the 'first book' category. The Keepsake Storm is an always-book of wild-good, uncanny poems that confront the creaturely world of fur and wings, the cruelty and seductiveness of the human animal. Franco's poems enact the thrill of alchemy and metamorphosis, the riveting moment when changelings are betwixt-between, nightingale or monsters -- it's hard to tell which, so vast and pliable and layered the scene. These poems sail above the whole bursting complex panoply of life, seeing and cherishing the chance to see. They bequeath a sense of place so deep it transcends particularity and arrives at the interior terrain of thought, the inscape of what-is. Gina Franco does the impossible thing that lyric poets set out to do: she retrieves the storm of being in its unsettling breadth, the world's devouring, the thou-art-that of transformation: hunger, love, death."  --Alice Fulton
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The Keepsake Storm was a runner-up with Sarabande Books, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, and the Tupelo Press Book Prize. It was a finalist with Ashland Poetry Press, the Richard Snyder Prize, and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. It was also a semifinalist with the Verse Press Book Prize, the Zoo Press Book Prize, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize 2002, and Lynx House Press Prize.
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photo taken at Casa Libre en la Solana by poet and photographer, Simmons Buntin


photo by Simmons Buntin


photo taken at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference by Thomas Sayers Ellis


photo taken with Richard Siken at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference by Wendy Walters


photo taken in Galesburg, Illinois, by Emily Anderson


photo taken in Tucson, Arizona, by Trystan Garcia

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