Press Profiles - Fran Abrams

Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. She holds an undergraduate degree in art and architecture and a master’s degree in urban planning. For 41 years, she worked in government and nonprofit agencies in Montgomery County, MD, where her work included a significant amount of writing, such as legislation, regulations, guidelines, grant proposals, reports, and other bureaucratic necessities.

In addition to her day job, she began working in 2000 as a visual artist. After retiring in 2010, she devoted much of her time to her art. In 2016, she wrote a lengthy funding proposal to support Foundry Gallery, a nonprofit art gallery in Washington, DC, where she exhibited her artwork. After completing that proposal, she realized how much she missed expressing herself in words.

Fran decided she wanted to write in a form that was completely different from her past work. She attended a poetry reading early in 2017, and, inspired by that experience, she began taking poetry writing classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. In September 2017, she traveled to Italy with her first writing instructor and a group of women poets for a poetry retreat that reinforced her commitment to writing poems. She continues to take classes about the craft of writing poetry.

Fran’s poems have been published online and in print in Cathexis-Northwest Press, The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Ravens Perch, Gargoyle, and many others. Her poems appear in more than a dozen anthologies, including the 2021 collection titled This is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House (WWPH).

In December 2021, she won the WWPH Winter Poetry Prize for her poem titled “Waiting for Snow.” In July 2022, her poem “Arranging Words” was a finalist in the 2022 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry.

In 2019, she was a juried poet at Houston (TX) Poetry Fest. She was a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading in 2021 and 2023. In January 2023, she was a guest author on the podcast Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio hosted by Dr. Michael Anthony Ingram. She read at the Kensington, MD, Day of the Book Festival in April 2023, and the Gaithersburg, MD, Book Festival in May 2023.

Her autobiographical book of poems titled I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir was published in 2022 by Atmosphere Press. In April 2023, her first chapbook, titled The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Please visit www.franabramspoetry.com for more.