She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year.

[3] She lived and worked for 15 years in Detroit, Michigan, where she was instrumental in fostering a literary community for youth, young-adult and adult poets.

[5] From North Carolina State she went on to gain tenure at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

In 2021, The Sewanee Review announced Francis as the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Writing for the judging committee for the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine praised Forest Primeval as "an intense work, dark … Dantean … dreamlike in its visions.... Francis is reclaiming modernist and feminist legacies of poetry, and it takes great courage to do that.