American writer and poet
Franny Choi (born February 11, 1989)[citation needed] is an American writer, poet and playwright.[1]
Life
Choi uses she and they pronouns.[1] She lived in Northampton, Massachusetts and now resides in Greenfield, Massachusetts.[2][3] Choi's parents are Choi Inyeong and Nam Songeun.[4] She is Korean-American. In high school, Choi was introduced to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and became interested in poetry's spoken form. In college, she joined a group for marginalized spoken poets, called WORD!, which was her introduction to slam poetry.[5]
Education and career
Choi graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in Literary Arts and Ethnic Studies in 2011 and received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan.[6] After graduating, she became a co-director of the Providence Poetry Slam. She founded the Dark Noise Collective with Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, and Aaron Samuels in 2012.[2]
Choi worked for Hyphen, a non-profit Asian-American culture magazine, as a senior editor. She was co-host, with Danez Smith, of the podcast VS.[2] She was a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in English at Williams College; in 2022 she joined the undergraduate Literature Faculty at Bennington College.[7][8]
Awards
Choi is a two-time winner of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam.[9] In 2020, Soft Science won the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association's Elgin Award.[10]
Activism
Choi promotes social activism through her poetry and writing.[11] In her poem "Whiteness Walks Into A Bar", she highlights institutionalized racism in the United States.[12] Other poems, like "furiosa", focus on feminism.[13] Choi curated a series of video poems by 12 queer Asian American and Pacific Islander poets for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.[14]
Bibliography
Books
Chapbooks
References
External links
