My hope is for this project to give a sense of the vastness and complexity of the subject of femininity; to both critique and celebrate.

My piece "Frame" is an ekphrastic based on an untitled photograph by the Civil Rights era photojournalist Gordon Parks, whose groundbreaking work in LIFE Magazine took an intimate and deeply humanizing approach to showing the experiences of Black southerners living under segregation. Though this poem is absent of familiar markers of race, the piece is ultimately about restriction; not only the restrictions of the most visible manifestations of structural racism, but also of gender, of family legacy, of language, of being an Othered body on display.

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Frederick Bock Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The Journal, PANK, Redivider, and others. She is a VONA Fellow, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. She lives in the biggest city in the smallest state.