Franklin Abbott
Franklin Abbott was raised and educated in the Deep South where he has lived most of his life. He attended undergraduate school at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and received his master's in social work at the University of Georgia. He has lived in Atlanta since the late '70's and was a psychotherapist in private practice for over forty years. His work as a therpist spaned three great American traumas, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11 and Covid. He specialized in spiritual issues, medical trauma, relationships and group dynamics. He was part of the early Radical Faerie movement and the pro-feminist men's movement and edited 3 anthologies on men and masculinity. Boyhood: Growing Up Male, his last anthology was republished by the University of Wisconsin Press. Abbott served as poetry editor for RFD magazine and Changing Men magazine. He was a conference organizer for he National Organization of Men Against Sexism, Gay Spirit Visions and founded the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival. Among the poets and writers he was closest to were James Broughton and Assotto Saint.
His first collection of poetry, Mortal Love, was published by RFD Press. His second collection, Pink Zinnia was published by Author House and his new collection, My Ordinary Life, will also be published by RFD Press. In 2018 he released a double CD of original music and poetry. He composed music based on Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi, Shakespeare, Blake and Broughton and contemporary poets Anne Hartigan and Bob Vance. Several of the songs were based on his own poems including "My Ordinary Life." The late June Dobbs Butts appears on the CD reading his poem "Milky Way."
Abbott's papers are archived in the Special Collections on Women and Gender at Georgia State University. He has conducted dozens of oral histories for the archives including June Dobbs Butts daughter of civil rights pioneer John Wesley Dobbs and the first African American trained as a sex researcher by Masters and Johnson. He began the archives series of interviews with some of the first Indian immigrants to Atlanta including Drs. Bairath and Uma Madjmudar and Dr. Kamla Dutt. He has contributed to Atlanta's noteworthy South Asian journal with interviews with novelist Manil Suri and graphic artist Abishek Singh. He has also written articles about travels in India and about India's nature photographeres. His work in RFD has included inteviews with authors Alysia Abbott, Allan Gurganus and Jericho Brown. Among the authors published in his anthologies are Essex Hemphill, Robert Bly, Thomas Moore, Malidoma Some and Terry Kupers. Abbott was a frequent contributor to Atlanta INtown inteviewing a wide range of artists, writers and musicians including Judy Collins, John Waters, Anoushak Shankar, Terence Blanchard, Charlie Crawford and many more.
Deeply interested in other cultures, Abbott has travelled extensively in the developing world where he has made many friends. He has delivered talks at Joshi Bedeker College in Mumbai, India, facilitated the first Eurofaerie gathering in the Netherlands and written extensively of his travels in Ghana, Venezuela, India and Japan. He is just returning from India where he gave readings in Delhi and Chandigarh and attended the Jaipur Literature Festival. His interest in non-Western culture is inspired by his love of art and music but more deeply by looking for universal threads in spiritual tradition and understanding how consciousness is experienced differently in different cultures.
