DENICE FROHMAN is a poet and performer from New York City. A Pew Fellow and Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, she’s received support from CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Recently, she debuted her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, centering the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. She lives in Philadelphia.

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DENICE FROHMAN is a poet and performer from New York City. A Pew Fellow and Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, she’s received additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures, Leeway Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Colony, and is a former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion.

For nearly two decades she has performed widely on national and international stages from The Apollo to The White House. 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, cultural preservation, and aims to subvert traditional notions of power and knowledge. As a queer Nuyorican, she is the daughter of Puerto Rican and Jewish parents. She also 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.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Rumpus, ESPNW, The Rumpus, Split This Rock's The Quarry, The Acentos Review and elsewhere. In print, her work has appeared in the following anthologies: Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books); What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern Press); Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books); Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word (Rethinking Schools, 2nd ed.); and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books).

Notable performances include: The White House (Obama Administration), Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Apollo, MoMA PS 1, PEN World Voices Festival, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (France), The Brooklyn Book Festival, Lincoln Center, El Festival de la Palabra (Puerto Rico), NBCUniversal, ACLU (PA), TedxPhilly, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, City of Philadelphia's Office of LGBT Affairs, The Chewstick Foundation (Bermuda), U.S Hispanic Leadership Institute, and at over 400 colleges and universities. 

Videos of her poetry performances have collectively garnered over 10 million views online. She’s been featured in Elle Magazine, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, AutoStraddle, and Upworthy. She also appeared on and co-hosted an episode of NPR’s Code Switch podcast. TV appearances include ESPN's "One Nacion" TV special and Lexus' Verses and Flow on TV One, among others. She was named "Top 20 Emerging LGBT Leader" by the Philadelphia Gay Newspaper and one of "Five LGBTQ Latinx Heroes for Every Classroom" by GLSEN.

Her poetry has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ESPN, Indeed, mitú, the City of Philadelphia, GALAEI (Gay and Lesbian Latino Aids Education Initiative), Greater Philadelphia Cultural Affairs, and Twitter as part of the #HereWeAre campaign to uplift women's voices, which aired during the Oscar’s on national television in 2018. She has written creative content for major brands, collaborated with arts organization, and worked with grassroots non-profits on social justice campaigns. Her collaboration with TED produced an award-winning animated video of “Accents,” which won first place at the Annecy International Animation Festival (Commissioned Films category, 2019).

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, especially LGBT youth and youth of color, has always been a central part of her work.

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.