Franco Laguna Correa

Franco Laguna Correa was born in Mexico City. He is a writer, ethnographer, and musician/composer, also known for his heteronyms "Dr. Crank," "Crank," "Sardine," "f.l Crank," "Gaetano Fonseca" and "Mehmet Amazigh." He has been included by literary critics in the so-called New Latino Boom, which is a literary movement that features 21st-century Latin American fiction authors writing in Spanish in the United States. He has contributted to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (ORE) with the essay "Brown/Brownness/Mestizaje".

He was awarded in 2012 the National Literary Prize of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), an institution based in New York City. In 2013, he received the International Poetry Prize of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes. In 2016, Laguna Correa was one of the recipients of The Fuerza Award, a social recognition for his intellectual activism in the Pittsburgh area granted by The City of Pittsburgh, the collective Café con Leche, and The Latin American Cultural Union (LACU). The Chicago Review of Books recommended his book Crush Me (a broken novel) for the 2017 National Poetry Month.

His novel Wild North was included in the list of best Mexican fiction of 2017 and published in the daily newspaper El Informador.

He has been invited to deliver talks about his research at various institutions, including Emory University, the University of California, Texas State University, and Duke University.

Besides contributing on regular basis to the online publications E-International Relations and Forum Nepantla; he is the creator of the online project Cyber~Texts.

Education & Teaching
He graduated from the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in 2001 after being forced to interrupt his studies due to the 1999 UNAM strike.He began his university studies at The School of Philosophy and Letters and The School of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which is often cited as the most prestigious university of the Spanish-speaking world.

He completed his undergraduate education at Portland State University, where he received a double BA in Liberal Studies and Literature. In addition, he completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Pittsburgh and two M.A. degrees, one in Social Anthropology and another in Philosophy, both at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

He was the recipient in 2014 of the K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2016 he received a doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in Cultural and Literary Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held researching and teaching appointments at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, High Point University, the University of Denver, and Universidad del Valle de México.

Music & Sonic Endeavors
Since 2018, Franco Alessandro has devoted extensive time to the composition and performance of various forms of sonic and musical ensembles. Besides taking singing lessons both in Europe and the United States, he has taken his theoretical interests in sonic borderspaces to the realms of music and sound creation. He has recorded a few symphonic pieces that feature only vocal acoustic renderings of his voices. Based on his personal interests and recorded pieces, Franco Alessandro has termed his music as "sonic realities" and his personal performative style as "Post-Modern Troubadour". Franco Alessandro is also the creator of NUCLEAR ZOUND.

Theoretical Work
He has published scholarly works on various subjects, including exile, cognitive approaches to cultural modernity, the implications of neoliberalism in the production of literary texts, postmodernity, subalternity, the intersection of culture and sound, among others. The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation (2023) and the A Companion to Multiethnic Literature of the United States (2023) credit Laguna Correa for coining the term "New Latino American", which puts forward the notion that in the United States new Latin American cultural agents are entangled within the framework of global capitalism as producers of cultural artifacts distinct to those produced by traditional Latino communities. He contributed to the re-discovery of the 19-century novella Perico by Arcadio Zentella with his academic article, "Recuperando a "Perico" de Arcadio Zentella como un proyecto subalterno de liberación," published in 2013 by the journal A Contracorriente of North Carolina State University.

Cyber~texts

 * (2023) ENTANGLEMENT, Radical Narratives, Chicago (online). (published with the heteronym "Dr. Crank")

Novellas and novels

 * (2020) The Invisible Militia, Radical Narratives, Chicago. (published with the heteronym "Dr. Crank")
 * (2020) Acedia, Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "f.l. Crank")
 * (2020) Diario supino, Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "f.l. Crank")
 * (2018) Ortodoxa (contra-manual), Suburbano Ediciones, Miami.
 * (2017) Crush Me: Ría Brava (a broken novel), Radical Narratives, Chicago. (published with the heteronym "f.l. Crank")


 * (2016) Wild North, Rayo Press, Tamaulipas.

Short Stories

 * (2020) Historia de un hombre devastado por el siglo XX, Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Memoria de una alarma contra incendios, Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Cambio de piel, Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Sentencia definitiva, Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2011) Crítica literaria y otros cuentos, Editorial Paroxismo, Carolina del Norte/Ciudad de México.

Flash-fictions

 * (2020) Federratas (finales felices), Rayo Press, California. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2012) Finales felices, Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, New York City.

Poetry

 * (2020) Requiem for The Unhappy, Radical Narratives, Chicago. (published with the heteronym "f.l. Crank")
 * (2020) Poesía Temprana (2005-2012), Miglior Fabbro Eds., Portugal (Entroncamento), Sicilia (Mazzara del Vallo), Valparaíso (Zacatecas, Mexico). (published with the heteronym "Gaetano Fonseca")
 * (2020) Testament. (volume 1), Radical Narratives, Chicago. (published with the heteronym "Dr. Crank")

Essays

 * (2020) Essays on Pop Culture, Sonic Modernity, The Anthropocene, and Artificial Intelligence, Free Press, Manchester, UK. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) La vida después del presente: La irrupción de la Inteligencia Artificial en la vida cotidiana, Pensamiento Libre, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Distorsiones y encubrimientos: Crítica al campo intelectual en México, Pensamiento Libre, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Fuera de México (Ensayos), Pensamiento Libre, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) El intelectual en su tiempo: Un acercamiento cognitivo al pensamiento político, histórico e intelectual de Lucas Alamán, Pensamiento Libre, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Esclavitud en Tabasco durante el Porfiriato, Pensamiento Libre, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")
 * (2020) Utopía poética, impotencia amorosa e imaginación temporal en María Luisa Bombal, Pablo Neruda y Mario Benedetti, Pensamiento Libre, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires. (published with the heteronym "F. Laguna Correa")

Memoir

 * (2020) Portable Museum: Lighter Than Air (a memoir), Real Time, New York City. (published with the heteronym "f.l. Crank")

Hybrid Genres

 * (2020) Pedagogy for (all): Reading Lessons, Thinking Books, Lagos, Nigeria. (published with the heteronym "Dr. Crank")
 * (2020) The Book Where You Surrender, Radical Narratives, Chicago. (published with the heteronym "Dr. Crank")
 * (2014) Resquebrajadura: deforme y mutilado, este relato, Editorial Paroxismo, North Carolina/Mexico City.

Aphorism

 * (2020) Aphorism(s), Radical Narratives, Chicago. (published with the heteronym "Dr. Crank")