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, reports, and other bureaucratic essentials.

After retiring, 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 began taking poetry writing classes at the age of 73 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.

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 Raven’s Perch, Gargoyle, Orchards, and many others. Her poems appear in more than twenty anthologies, most recently America’s Future from WWPH (2025), and Bearing Witness from Sligo Creek Publishing (2026). 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 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.One of her poems was nominated by Gargoyle Magazine for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. In 2026, her unpublished manuscript titled The Last Appointment, her entry to The Letter Review Prize (January-April 2026) was selected for the Shortlist. Although it does not result in publication, it is an important award from among many entries.

Fran was co-editor of an anthology of poems, including her own, titled Echoes through the Stacks, published in 2024. Her poems are included in more than twenty anthologies, most recently America’s Future from WWPH (2025), and Bearing Witness from Sligo Creek Publishing (2026).

At the age of 82, Fran has been writing poetry for almost ten years and has had six books of poetry published.

Please click on the Books page for more information about each book and where to purchase them. Thank you!