The Visual Essay: Experiments in Form

Gabriela Denise Frank writes about twenty-first century dreams: pop culture, nostalgia, individualism, burnout, midlife crisis, environmental entanglements, climate disruption, and songs of contamination, faith, nature, and identity. Her work is rooted in place: her native Detroit, the American West where she’s made a home, her ancestral homeland of Italy, and landscapes—urban, rural, and wild—around the world. She lives on traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples: the ancestral and unceded lands and waters of the Duwamish and Muckleshoot communities. Her essays, interviews, hybrids, and short fiction have been published in True Story, Tahoma Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, Crab Creek Review, The Normal School, Lunch Ticket, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Off the page, her literary art installations transform storytelling into experience. With A Novel Performance, Gabriela staged a month-long performance installation in Seattle’s Central Library that invited the public to watch via live monitor as she wrote a 70,000-word novel. With UGLY ME, Gabriela staged a multi-media spoken word installation that explored beauty through the medium of the selfie at Jack Straw Cultural Center’s New Media Gallery. An advocate for public art and artists, Gabriela serves as an arts commissioner for the City of Burien, on 4Culture’s arts advisory committee, and as the creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review.