About

Frankie Concepcion is a writer, educator, and organizer from the Philippines currently living in Somerville, MA. Her work has been published internationally in journals such as Bodega Magazine, Waxwing Literary Journal, The Toast, and Filipino news platform, Rappler, amongst others. She has served on the editorial teams of Boston-based food journal GRLSQUASH, Winter Tangerine, and Side B Magazine, and is an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writing Workshop and the GrubStreet Short Story Incubator. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received Honorable Mention for the 2020 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writers Fellowship, and has been a Finalist for the 2020 Passages North Waasnode Fiction Prize and 2018 F(r)iction Summer Literary Contest.

In 2019, Frankie became a permanent resident of the US after living in Boston for almost a decade. That same year, she founded the Boston Immigrant Writers Salon, a community to empower and inspire immigrant voices, through which she has organized workshops, open-mic nights, healing salons, and lectures all over the Greater Boston area. Through her writing and work within the community, she seeks to create a new immigration narrative— one that interrogates America’s ownership over the ‘immigrant experience,’ and explores our longing for things left behind just as deeply as our reasons for leaving.

Past Events

October 2019: Defining Home and Other Stories at the School Street Sessions
A lecture on finding your place within the “immigrant experience” and America’s ownership of immigrant narratives.

October 2019: Rewriting Our Stories: A Workshop for Immigrant and Diaspora Writers at the Boston Book Festival
A multi-media, collaborative workshop on breaking down stereotypes and celebrating individual immigrant experiences; in collaboration with writer and editor Kayti Lahsaiezadeh.

August 2019: BIWS x FEMS
A poetry workshop & open mic night featuring Boston Poet Laureate Emeritus Danielle Legros Georges; in collaboration with FEMS Poetry Slam.

May 2019: Duty Free: Asian Diaspora Storytelling Night (co-host)
An open-mic night celebrating Asian Diaspora communities, writers, and performers led by Boston-based writer, artist, and performer Hassan Ghanny.

March 2019: Navigating Creativity in White Spaces Workshop (in collaboration with Spaceus and Arielle Gray)
A generative workshop to name the invisible burdens placed on BIPOC in artistic industries and finding methods of self-care; in collaboration with Arielle Gray of Print Ain’t Dead and Spaceus.

March 2019: Healing Salon: Defining Home
A night of gathering and self-care through the sharing of stories and building a community for immigrants, by immigrants.

After living in the U.S. for 8 years on a student visa, the year 2018 was meant to be my final year in America. Today, I am a permanent resident of the United States, but for many years I had lived with the understanding that my time here was always temporary. In Leaving, what began as an exercise in mourning the country I had called home for almost a decade eventually became my humble attempt at documenting what it is like to try, and still want to be, an immigrant in America.