Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. She holds an undergraduate degree in art and architecture and a master’s degree in urban planning. She retired in 2010 after 41 years of working in government and nonprofit agencies in Montgomery County, MD. Her work included a substantial amount of writing, including legislation, regulations, guidelines, reports, and other bureaucratic essentials.
In 2016, she realized how much she missed expressing herself in words and decided she wanted to write poetry, a form that was completely different from her past work. She attended a poetry reading early in 2017 and began taking poetry writing classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, which she found enjoyable and encouraging.
Fran’s poems are published online and in print in The Delmarva Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Cathexis-Northwest Press, MacQueen’s Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, The Write Launch, Gargoyle, and many others. They also appear in more than twenty anthologies, including the 2021 collection titled This Is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House (WWPH).
Her full-length autobiographical book of poems is I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir (Atmosphere Press, 2022). Her chapbooks are The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras (Finishing Line Press, 2023) and Arranging Words (Quillkeepers Press, 2023). This collection is her fourth book of poems. Fran also was one of four editors of a collection of poems, including her own, titled Echoes Through the Stacks, published in April 2024 by a group of poets who workshop their poems together at Quince Orchard Library in Gaithersburg, MD.
She has been a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading in 2021 and 2023 and read at the Gaithersburg Book Festival in May 2023.
For more, please visit:
franabramspoetry.com
Paperback: 62 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (August 14, 2025)