Gina Franco received a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. in poetry writing, and an M.A. in English 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, and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. She received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Chasen Poetry Prize, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, poetry and poetry translation, Latino writing, and literary theory. Her current work is rethinking narrative structures, figurative language, utterance, and meaning. She divides her time between Galesburg, Illinois, where she teaches English and creative writing at Knox College, the Arizona desert where she grew up, and the Texas border, her mother's home.

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above photo by poet and 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




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


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