About the Author:

Elizabeth Frankie Rollins’ collection of short stories, The Sin Eater and Other Stories, was published by Queen’s Ferry Press in February 2013. Rollins has previously published work in Conjunctions, Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, The New England Review, Trickhouse, Tarpaulin Sky, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.  Excerpts from Origin have appeared in Drunken Boat. 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, the Curiosity Symposium, and a member of the board of Casa Libre en la Solana (non-profit writing center).

Raised in Virginia, Rollins began roaming in 1986, taking up residence in Maryland, Wyoming, North Carolina, New Jersey and Arizona.  After receiving her MFA in prose from Goddard College in Vermont in 2001, 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 and Assistant Curator at Tohono Chul Park.  Rollins teaches for Pima Community College, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Casa Libre.

In early 2006, Rollins had a dream where she was a gypsy fortune-telling head in a glass box at the seashore.  Shortly thereafter, she had another dream where she was a circus master holding a ring that revealed the great beyond; this was an utterly white and warm and loving space to which all things return as little tiny atoms upon perishing.  She saw a fading-into-brilliance.  With the urgency of these two revelations, she created a second self to be the fortune-telling ringmaster of her writing arts and advocacy, and Madame Frankie Karamazov was born.   Look for her publications under the name Elizabeth Rollins, but feel free to call her Frankie.