Elizabeth Rollins has previously published work in Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Green Mountains Review, The New England Review, Trickhouse, Tarpaulin Sky, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Sin Eater, Corvid Press, 2004. She received a 2003 New Jersey Prose Fellowship, and a Special Mention in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is a co-founder of the Corvid Writers and the Curiosity Symposium. Rollins has three manuscripts: two novels, Origin and Doctor Porchiat’s Dream, and a collection of short stories, The Sin Eater and Other Stories.
Raised in Virginia, Rollins began roaming in 1986, taking up residence in Maryland, Wyoming, North Carolina, and New Jersey. After receiving her MFA in prose from Goddard College in Vermont in 2001 (where she joined the Corvid Writers group), Rollins taught an independent series of Curious Creative Writing workshops in South Jersey from 2001-2009, and was a teaching artist for the New Jersey Writer’s Project and Rutgers-Camden Visual Poetry Poetry Program, winning the 2007 NJ Governor’s medal for her work. In August 2009, she moved to Tucson, Arizona with her husband, Ben Johnson, a fine arts painter. Since arriving in Tucson, Rollins has become Chairwoman of the Board of Directors for Casa Libre en la Solana (a non-profit writing and arts enclave), a mentor for Kore Press, adjunct faculty at Pima Community College, and an instructor for fiction workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A long-time ambassador for the arts, Rollins is responsible for succoring, illuminating, and helping to develop the creative lives of many souls.
In early 2006, Rollins had a dream where she was a gypsy fortune-telling head in a glass box at the seashore. Empowered by this and her literal act of teaching in the real world, she started the Curiosity Symposium with Ben Johnson. Shortly thereafter, she had another dream where she was a circus master holding a ring that revealed the great beyond; an utterly white and warm and loving space. With these two revelations, she created a second self to be the fortune-telling ringmaster of her writing arts and Madame Frankie Karamazov was born. Look for her publications under the name Elizabeth Frankie Rollins, but feel free to call her Frankie.