Author Spotlight: Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello is the author of the novel My Sister's Continent (2006) and the collection Slut Lullabies (2010). She is the editor of the collection Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters (2004), and she co-edited the collection Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience (2011). She is the fiction editor of The Nervous Breakdown, co-founder and Executive Editor of Other Voices Books, and she teaches creative writing at Columbia College and Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies. Her next book, A Life in Men will be released in 2013 by Algonquin Books.

As relaxed and unpretentious as she is, Gina would probably laugh and disagree if you called her out on being a little bit of a super-mom, but she not only writes, edits, publishes, and teaches; she's also a busy wife and mother with three kids at home. Like many of my favorite authors, she lets her family inform her writing, and it's clear if you spend more than five minutes around her that they enrich her life as much as we can be sure having her enriches theirs.

Aside from her arsenal of writing projects and teaching/editorial duties, and of course being the mom that we all (including us men) wish we could be, she also has contributed to just an astonishing number of interviews, guest blog appearances, articles, essays, and so forth online; everywhere from the Chicago Tribune to the Huffington Post. When I say "astonishing" I mean go to Google's search page and type in any random phrase, like "Irish jug band music" and you can be sure that at some point Gina has had something nuanced, incisive, and on-point to say about it that you'll wish you had thought of first. I'm only half-joking about this.

Readers of my blog will remember that her collection Slut Lullabies was one of my two favorite books of 2010 (tied with The Hunger Games), and I have a second copy of it on my bookshelf that I rescued from the diabolical clutches of Davis Schneiderman's book-dunking guillotine apparatus during Printer's Ball 2011. At first I thought I might lend out the second orphan copy but now I think I'm just going to keep both of them and make you buy your own. You'll thank me later.