Denice Frohman

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DENICE FROHMAN is a poet, performer, and educator from New York City. A Pew Fellow and Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, she’s received additional support from CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures, Leeway Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Colony, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and is a former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion. Her work explores the complexities of language, lineage, queerness, and the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. Frohman sees her poetry as a tool for social change, and cultural preservation, and aims to subvert traditional notions of power and knowledge. As a queer Nuyorican, Frohman is the daughter of Puerto Rican and Jewish parents. She played professional basketball in Puerto Rico after college, where she earned a four-year athletic scholarship, and earned her Master’s in Education from Drexel University. As a facilitator, Frohman has led workshops for adults and young people at The Watering Hole Retreat (faculty), Intercultural Journeys, Girls Leadership Institute, Youth Study Juvenile Detention Center, and at hundreds of schools and organizations. A former Program Director at The Philly Youth Poetry Movement, she worked to create safe spaces for Philadelphia teens to discover the power of their voices. Her passion to mentor young people has always been a central part of her work and she hopes to inspire them — especially young queer people of color— to know that their stories are worth telling. Along with a collective of Puerto Rican writers, she co-organized #PoetsforPuertoRico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to raise funds and consciousness about the ongoing political and humanitarian crisis on the island. She lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Lady Jordan

It didn’t matter that I married the game

or slept with a ball under my arm, Mom said

Girls don’t hoop, they wear hoops. And around here,

vecinas chirped: it’s always “¿Y tú novio?” season. But beauty

is a finger roll. A backdoor cut on the blacktop. A fadeaway

jump shot, two seconds left on the clock. So what mattered was Danny

talkin’ smack, even though his teeth were out of order. This isn’t the only history,

but is the history of everything: the neighborhood boys

who shot crooked, never learned my name, so I played them

Twenty-one, turned their ankles to jello,

made their backs kiss the floor, until they donned me

Lady Jordan, and who wouldn’t take that. Though I’ve never been

ladylike, I wore that rusted metal rim like a ring,

and slipped my bones through the net like a perfect white dress—

Published:

2020

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Spoken Word

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Agency

Bilingual

Childhood & Coming of Age

Intersectionality & Culture

LGBTQ+ Experience

Music & Sports

Poetic Form

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Allusion

an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Extended Metaphor

a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem

Hyperbole

exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”

Sonnet

A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.