Frankie thomas

This Fellowship is produced in partnership with the McIntyre Foundation, New Mexico School for the Arts, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Frankie Thomas is a writer born and raised in New York City. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship. As a fiction author, essayist, and literary critic, she writes about LGBT identity, children’s literature, 1990s pop culture, and queer aesthetics.

Her novella “The Showrunner,” published in AtLength magazine, received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthologyand won a Best of the Net Award. Her other fiction includes “Equinox,” which was serialized in The Toast; “The Peace Garden,” published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn; “The Naked Party,” published in H.O.W. Journal; and “Assumption,” which appeared in the final issue of the LGBT literary journal BLOOM.

She is a frequent online contributor to the Paris Review, where her monthly “YA of Yore” column reevaluates children’s literature of the 1990s from a queer perspective. In April 2018 she appeared on PBS NewsHour in a segment called “Why Learning Latin Stays With You Forever,” an adaptation of her Paris Reviewessay “‘Human Life Is Punishment,’ and Other Pleasures of Studying Latin.” Her academic paper “Unspeakable ‘Circe’: Sexual Perversion and the Lacanian Detour in Ulysses” was published in the Summer 2017 issue of James Joyce Quarterly.

She is currently a grateful recipient of the McIntyre Fellowship and hard at work on her first novel.