Krista Franklin

Krista Franklin
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Kent State University and Columbia College Chicago
Known for	collage, poetry
Awards	Cave Canem Foundation Fellowship
Website	kristafranklin.com

Krista Franklin is an African-American poet and visual artist, whose main artistic focus is collage. Her work, which addresses race, gender, and class issues, combines personal, pop-cultural, and historical imagery.

Franklin is originally from Dayton, Ohio. She received her BA from Kent State University, and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago where, in 2013, she wrote her thesis titled The Two Thousand & Thirteen Narrative(s) of Naima Brown that brought to life a girl changeling on the precipice of young adulthood and has received recognition for her work from such prestigious programs as the Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She is based in Chicago, Illinois, where in 2007 she was the recipient of a Chicago Artist Assistance Program Grant for her art book SEED (The Book of Eve), which she says was based upon the dystopic visions of the award-winning African-American science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.

Franklin's artwork includes themes of surrealism and utopic and dystopic visions, with subtexts of black beauty, self-reflection, and the African Diaspora. She has described her approach as both Afro-Futurist and Afro-Surrealist. She has stated, "Inspiration is a myth created to feed the romantic lure around artists and artistry. Art is thinking and labor."

Her artwork has been featured in the television series Empire. Her collages have also been used on the covers of several poetry collections, including John Murillo’s Up Jumps the Boogie (2010) and Lita Hooper’s Thunder in Her Voice (2010). She has also had her work published in American Studies,Callaloo, and Ecotone.

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