Joan Frank was born to New Yorkers in Phoenix, Arizona and has lived in the Hawaiian Islands, West Africa, and San Francisco. Her first book of collected short stories, Boys Keep Being Born, is slated for publication by the University of Missouri Press in Fall, 2001. Her literary nonfiction and short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, American Literary Review, Confrontations, Salmagundi, Notre Dame Review, Antioch Review, and many anthologies and journals. She began her fiction study with the gifted author Thaisa Frank (no relation) at the University of California at Berkeley, and took her MFA at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, where she worked with wonderful writers like Stephen Dobyns, Antonya Nelson, Susan Neville, Andrea Barrett, and Margot Livesey. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Iowa Literary Award for short fiction. Her recent short stories have been nominated for inclusion in Pushcart Press's Best of the Press 2000. She has taught the short story to creative writing students at San Francisco State University, and is currently working on a new collection of short fiction and a book about the writing life. She lives in Northern California with playwright Robert Duxbury.