Gina Franco’s recent book, The Accidental, winner of the 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, was published with the University of Arkansas Press in October of 2019. Set primarily in the borderlands of the American southwest, the collection reflects on accident and its role in creating the lives we are born into—and in determining how those lives end.

Her first book, The Keepsake Storm, published with the University of Arizona Press, interrogates the uneasy alliance between the vehemence of memory and the surrealism of narrative, especially in light of language, place, faith, and identity.

She keeps a journal of photographs at reli[e]able signs that reflects her travels between Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas—where her family lives—and Illinois, where she and her husband live and work most of the year.

Her writing has been widely published in literary journals, including: 32 Poems, America, Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, BorderSenses, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Diagram, Drunken Boat, Image, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Saint Katherine Review, Seneca Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Tuesday; an Art Project, West Branch, Zocalo, and Zone 3.

Her work is also anthologized in A Best of Fence: the First Nine Years; Lasting: Poems on Aging; The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry; Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing; and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity.

She earned degrees from Smith College and Cornell University, and was awarded residencies and fellowships with Casa Libre en la Solana, the Santa Fe Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and PINTURA:PALABRA, sponsored by Letras Latinas, Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame.

She served as art editor for several years to Pilgrimage Magazine, and she taught at Image Journal’s 2017 and 2018 summer Glen Workshop.

She teaches poetry writing, 18th & 19th-century British literature, Gothic literature, poetry translation, Borderland writing, religion and literature, and literary theory at Knox College, where she was awarded the Philip Green Wright-Lombard Prize for distinguished teaching.

She is an oblate with the monastic order of the Community of St. John, and she is married to Christopher Poore, who is currently a Regenstein Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School.