Frank Báez

"One has to go through difficulty, because it's in difficulty that you find something new, something different."

Francisco "Frank" Leonardo Báez Rosario is a Dominican poet, narrator, chronicler, and artist whose literary contributions have earned him international recognition. Baéz is also a psychologist by profession. He has a postgraduate degree in social research from the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Báez's poetic work includes the award-winning collection Postales, which won the Salomé Ureña National Poetry Prize. His poetry has been translated into English, and has also reached the Arab public, as he has an anthology published by the Egyptian publisher Sef Safa. He has participated in poetry festivals around the world, taking his verses from America to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Also, his poems have been included in several anthologies. His most recent collection of poems is entitled Este es el futuro que estabas esperando, published in 2017.

Apart from poetry, Báez has made prose works such as the collection of short stories Págales tú a los psicoanalistas, which, in 2007, won the International Young Story Prize at the International Book Fair. He also has non-fiction works such as La trilogía de los festivales and the chronicle Lo que trajo el mar.

Baez is a DJ enthusiast; he combines storytelling with musical beats. The musical and audiovisual exploration of his work is manifested mainly in El Hombrecito, a group co-founded by Baéz in 2008. It was the first spoken word band in the Dominican Republic, and has three musical albums: Llegó el Hombrecito, La Última Vuelta, and Fin de la Transmisión. They have also performed in live concerts.

In his professional career, Baéz has also served as editor of the magazine Global and as co-editor of the poetry magazine Ping Pong. He has also been a reporter and chronicler in media such as El País, and the Revista de la Universidad de México. Beyond writing, he has worked as a teacher, teaching courses and workshops on screenwriting, creative writing, and poetry in organizations and institutions such as the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Ministry of Education of the Dominican Republic.

For his outstanding career, in 2017, the 39th edition of the Hay Festival in Bogotá recognized him as one of the 39 best fiction writers under forty years of age in Latin America. From 2023 to 2024, Baéz was selected as a scholar for the Mellon Fellowship for High Impact Scholars, Artists, and Journalists, a project at the University of Texas that makes this digital repository possible.