Ke Francis is a narrative artist with skills in both the visual arts and the literary arts. He and his wife Mary are the co-owners of Hoopsnake Press, a fine art press that publishes artist books and prints, and his poetry and short stories have been published in journals across the nation. He was born in Memphis and educated at Mississippi State University, The University of Memphis, and the Memphis College of Art, finally earning a BFA from the Cleveland Art Institute in 1967. He taught sculpture there from until 1970 when he returned to Tupelo to open Francis Studios and started Hoopsnake Press, where he worked as a sculptor and printmaker for nearly thirty years.
In 1996, Francis became Director of Flying Horse Editions, a fine art press at the University of Central Florida, where he was later promoted to professor and became chair of the art department and served as dean of research for the College of Arts and Humanities.
Francis has exhibited extensively, with more than fifty solo and two-person exhibits. His works are found in more than thirty major public and private international collections, including The Getty Museum, The National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Atlanta’s High Museum, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and others.
He has received prestigious grants from the NEA, the Southern Arts Federation, and the Mississippi Arts Commission, and he was selected as a Fellow of the Bellagio Study Center, Bellagio, Italy (Rockefeller Foundation) and received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award.
