FRANKIE THOMAS

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

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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.

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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.

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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.