Joan Frank

Joan Frank is the author of two novels: The Great Far Away (The Permanent Press, March 2007), nominated for the 2008 Northern California Book Award in Fiction, and Miss Kansas City (The University of Michigan Press, 2006), winner of the 2006 Michigan Literary Fiction Award and 2007 nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction. Her first story collection, Boys Keep Being Born, was published in 2001 by The University of Missouri Press. Her stories and essays appear in many literary journals, including The Antioch Review, Baltimore Review, Confrontation, Salmagundi, and such anthologies as Americans in Paris, The Book of Eros, and The Writer’s Reader.

Joan was born to New Yorkers in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in the Hawaiian Islands, West Africa, Paris, France, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied with author Thaisa Frank (no relation) at the University of California in Berkeley, CA, and later took an MFA in creative fiction at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.

Joan is a MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, a Pushcart Prize- and Bread Loaf Fellow nominee, winner of the Iowa Writing Award and Emrys Fiction Award, recipient of a Barbara Deming Fund Grant and Ludwig Vogelstein Grant, and nominee (Miss Kansas City) for a Northern California Book Award in Fiction. She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and in private consultation. She lives in Northern California.