Frances Cannon is an interdisciplinary writer, editor, educator, and artist. She is the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College. She edits for The Kenyon Review, Green Writers Press, Onion River Press, and Maple Tree Press. She recently served as the Managing Director of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont. She has taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Champlain College, the Vermont Commons School, the University of Iowa, and Burlington City Arts. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in poetry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. Her published books include: Walter Benjamin Reimagined, MIT Press, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, Gold Wake Press, Tropicalia, Vagabond Press, Predator/Play, Ethel Press, Uranian Fruit, Honeybee Press, Sagittaria, Bottlecap Press, Image Burn, a self-published art book, and Fling Diction, Green Writers Press. She has worked for The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, and The Lucky Peach. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Northwest, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, The Green Mountain Review, Vice, Lithub, The Moscow Times, The Examined Life Journal, Gastronomica, Electric Lit, Edible magazine, North American Review, Fourth Genre, Rhino Poetry, and The Kenyon Review.  

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Duncan Campbell, author of Farmstead, Fire, Field and Joysong Demarcation :

“I am envious of Frances Cannon with every fiber of my grotesque and oblong soul, because she is the kind of writer and artist whose gentle mastery of expression, confidence in creative experimentation, and ceaselessly gracious open heartedness all writhe with the sort of purity and candor all of us here can only hope to aim for with the pebbles littering the floor of the oubliette we’re all trapped together within.

Frances’s showstopping books include the tour-de-force anthropomorphic autofiction novel The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank from Gold Wake Press, the kaleidoscopic multi-genre graphic encyclopedia of translation Walter Benjamin Reimagined from MIT Press, a chapbook of poems reveling within the simple wonders of the natural world as well as the pitfalls and balancing acts of human sexuality: Sagittaria from Bottlecap Press, the collections of poetry Predator/Play and Uranian Fruit from Ethel Press and Honeybee Press respectively, the collaborative poetry and painting collection Tropicalia with Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta from Vagabond Press, and an upcoming collection of poems from Green Writers Press with the perfect title: Fling Diction, due out in February 2024. In addition to her publications, Frances edits for Green Writers Press, Onion River Press, and Maple Tree Press, and teaches at Burlington City Arts.

Frances is the rare artist whose power of observation is both large enough and precise enough to hold the entire specificity of our world within it. Am I saying that she is a genius? I would argue she is, and listener, please know that anyone who chose to argue against me in this would lose.

This fall Frances will be joining the esteemed faculty at Kenyon College as the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow for a two-year appointment. I, for one, miss her already. Please join me in welcoming Frances Cannon.”