Franny Choi
“Poetry helps me to have a conversation with history. It’s hard for me to understand the past as a series of events. Poetry allows me to understand history by embodying it from my own subjective position and to track the ways that those imprints of the past show up in my sentences.”
“In their arresting poetry collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi considers the many ways in which the unthinkable has already happened for the most marginalized around the world by way of catastrophe, war, and devastation.’”
“Franny Choi’s generous inventiveness transmutes the book’s violent lore into a ferocious tenderness. In its conceptual heft, formal virtuosity, queer imagination, multi-dexterous approach to language, and tonal intricacy, Soft Science is a crucial book for our time—perhaps the book for our time.”
“. . . Choi creates an exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology.”
“Franny Choi’s Soft Science (2019) is shaped by a sequence of poems that structurally enact the assembling of a cyborg’s mind and body… how can one prove their own humanity, for what possible reason should one need to affirm their humanity, and who feels holy enough to ask for that affirmation.”
“Franny is an incredible innovator, constantly pushing what the forms of poetry and language can do. The book examines the very idea of softness, of what it means to be human in an increasingly inhumane world.”
Franny Choi is a queer, Korean American writer of poems, essays, and more. Her most recent book is The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (HarperCollins, 2022), an NPR 2022 Books We Love and Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist. Her other books are Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), a Rumpus and Paris Review staff pick that Lit Hub praised as “a profoundly intelligent work which makes you feel.'' It was a Nylon Best Book of 2019, was awarded the Elgin Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2020, and was a finalist for awards from Lambda Literary, Publishing Triangle, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Choi is also the author of the chapbook Death By Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and the debut collection Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She is at work on an essay collection about Asian robot women, forthcoming from Ecco. She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has also received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the poetry podcast VS with Danez Smith.
A Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the VONA Workshop, she founded the Brew & Forge Book Fair, a fundraising project that brings together readers and writers to build capacity in social justice community organizations. In 2019, she launched the Brew & Forge Lecture Series at Williams College, which puts poets and organizers in conversation with each other to discuss the intersections of activism and literary arts. As a curator, she has worked with organizations including Split This Rock and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she is particularly passionate about highlighting the voices of queer and trans poets of Asian/Pacific diasporas.
In an interview with The Paris Review, she was asked about how she uses form in her work: “I think when we play with form what we’re engaging with is the technology of the poem. And so when I play with form, what I’m doing is saying that I’m a coauthor of this text along with the machine of poetry—the mechanics of the lyric—in order to produce this thing. The mechanics of the poem and I are collaborating in order to make something new with language that didn’t belong to either of us to begin with. I’m still in the process of figuring out what a cyborg poetics is, but that feels like a clue to me.”
A seasoned performer, Choi is a two-time winner of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and has performed her work in schools, conferences, theaters, and bars across the country. As a teaching artist, she has taught students of all ages and levels of experience, both in formal classroom settings and through organizations like Project VOICE and InsideOut Literary Arts Project.
Choi is faculty in Literature at Bennington College.
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