Franny Choi

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Franny Choi, Paul Tran, and Nate Marshall for a conversation and virtual poetry reading of Franny's newest book The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On: Poems.

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Many have considered the last few years to be dystopic. But in Franny Choi’s upcoming new collection, The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On: Poems, she reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples, and calls forth the importance of imagining what will persist in the aftermaths. 

With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time—from comfort women during the Korean War to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual can fit within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness—between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest—could look like.

Franny Choi is the author of two previous poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), as well as one chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a recipient of Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize, and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their cat.

Paul Tran is the author of All The Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022). Their work appears in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Nate Marshall is an award-winning author and editor. His works include two full-length books of poems, Finna and Wild Hundreds. He teaches in the creative writing program at The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nate was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago.