frank kensaku saragosa
Fiction
Carlsbad, CA
frank kensaku saragosa is a San Diego based writer whose work is rooted in his experiences of homelessness, addiction, criminality and incarceration. Using drugs and living in crisis are intense and extreme experiences that are not always aesthetically beautiful, or even legible. Life within communities of homeless drug addicts has a lot of desire and need, a lot of conflict, and a whole lot of character, but not a lot of structure, coherence, or resolution, and he works in experimental and hybrid prose forms to explore ways of representing that life that feel true to those experiences.
saragosa won the 2022 PEN America Prison Writing Award for work he wrote while incarcerated, and was named a 2023 LAMBDA Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2024 Anaphora Arts Fellow. He is a founding member of the San Diego Unhoused Collective (with his collaborator Jason Ritchie) which was awarded the 2023-2024 Columbia University INCITE/Assembling Voices Fellowship to develop a documentary play devised from interviews with currently and formerly unhoused people, and is finishing an experimental, anti-narrative novel about life on the streets of downtown San Diego.