Glass Orchid's 2025 Molly Aviva Brodak Award for Bravery in Poetics
Announcing the inaugural recipient of our $10k grant to an artist of distinctively independent vision and approach, Frankie Tran.
Dear Friends,
Today we are very excited to announce the recipient of the 2025 Molly Aviva Brodak Award for Bravery in Poetics, a prize awarded to an artist of distinctively independent vision and approach.
As many of you know, this prize was conceived on a whim in 2020, and it’s been a long road since then of making a reality of the dream of honoring Molly’s legacy as an artist lost too young. Thanks to your support, we’ve been able since then to establish Glass Orchid as a nonprofit and build a sustainable infrastructure that we hope will continue to serve the independent literary community for years to come.
Molly would have celebrated her 45th birthday today. Her struggle to make art and maintain hope in an increasingly disorienting world continues to inspire our desire to foster support for innovation and singularity against the grain. Though her absence is loud, her spirit resounds, and we are grateful for the opportunity to draw strength from darkness through the arts.
Without further ado, the inaugural winner of the Molly Brodak Award is Frankie Tran.
Frankie is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma Press, 2018) and creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, community, and identity. Frankie’s longstanding commitment to making work that is singularly theirs among others—exploring themes of intimacy, preservation, exploration, generation, and time, among many more—embodies a depth and desire that imbues the world with the rarest of spirits.
Through Tender Table, Tran has spread their same energy into their community, “connecting and honoring our identities, traditions, joy, resilience, and fight for collective liberation through storytelling and food.” This overlap in aspiration between poetics and independence epitomizes the desire of Glass Orchid to provide support for those who seek to exist and create outside the high walls of a too often academic and bureaucratic status quo.
Frankie has received a $10,000 no-strings-attached grant to recognize and support their work.
More information on the selection process, a list of contributing donors, as well as a few of Frankie’s poems, are available on the Glass Orchid website. We would also like to thank our inaugural advisory board, Juliet Escoria, Lily Hoang, Janice Lee, and Richard Chiem, for their wisdom in helping us narrow down an extremely gifted and worthy field of honorees.
In closing, thank you for your attention, time, and support in making Glass Orchid a reality. We are grateful for the opportunity to lay new roots where they are badly needed, perhaps now than ever. Information on further awards and initiatives will be available announce in the future through this mailing list. Until then, take care.
Love,
Blake, Gene, Jenny, Megan, and Amy