Elizabeth Frankie Rollins

Madame Frankie Karamazov speaks: In the dream, I was a
gypsy fortune-teller. Actually, I was only the head of a gypsy fortune-teller,
kept in a glass box at the seashore. Stricken poets and tangled storytellers
and other writers came to me at this box and pressed their notebooks against
the salty, dim glass for me to read. I read their work and with a grinding of
gears, my plaster hands moved once up and down the dusty crystal ball, and
with a high clack! a paper fortune shot out of a slot below. These slips held
prompts, texts, urgings, prescriptions, single words, conversations. I stared
through my painted eyes as the reader took up their fortune slip and read it
greedily. Sometimes they glanced back up at me, wide-souled. Sometimes
they merely turned and hurried away, tucking the slip into their raincoat’s
pocket. Either way, I, though only a head, felt complete.

Elizabeth Rollins has previously published work in Conjunctions, Drunken Boat,
Green Mountains Review, The New England Review, Trickhouse, Tarpaulin
Sky, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. 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 and the Curiosity Symposium. Rollins has
three manuscripts: two novels, Origin and Doctor Porchiat’s Dream, and a
collection of short stories, The Sin Eater and Other Stories.

Raised in Virginia, Rollins began roaming in 1986, taking up residence in
Maryland, Wyoming, North Carolina, and New Jersey. After receiving her MFA
in prose from Goddard College in Vermont in 2001 where she met the Corvids,
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. Since
arriving in Tucson, Rollins has become Chairwoman of the Board of Directors
for Casa Libre en la Solana (a non-profit writing and arts enclave), a mentor for
Kore Press, adjunct faculty at Pima Community College, and an instructor for
fiction workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. A long-time
ambassador for the arts, Rollins is responsible for succoring, illuminating, and
helping to develop the creative lives of many souls.

In early 2006, Rollins had a dream where she was a gypsy fortune-telling head
in a glass box at the seashore. Empowered by this and her literal act of
teaching in the real world, she started the Curiosity Symposium with Ben
Johnson. Shortly thereafter, she had another dream where she was a circus
master holding a ring that revealed the great beyond; an utterly white and warm
and loving space. With these two revelations, she created a second self to be
the fortune-telling ringmaster of her writing arts and Madame Frankie
Karamazov was born. Look for her publications under the name Elizabeth
Frankie Rollins, but feel free to call her Frankie.

Email:

For more writing and the link to
Frankie's novel, Origin, go to:
www.madamekaramazov.com

Corvid Writers Home Page

elizabethpage@earthlink.net