Alice Friman is an award-winning poet and author of eight full-length books, including Blood Weather, The View from Saturn, and Vinculum. Born and raised in New York City, where she received her B.A. in Elementary Education from Brooklyn College in 1954. She taught in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant schools before moving to Dayton, Ohio in 1956. A few years later, Friman and her husband moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where she received an MA in English from Butler University. She gained a reputation only for her work and dynamic readings, but also as one of the founders of the Indiana Writers’ Center. Friman taught English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis from 1971-1993 and was named the University’s Teacher of the Year in 1993.
Her Georgia roots started in 2003, when she moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where she was poet-in-residence for Georgia College and State University’s MFA program. Friman began teaching at Georgia College and later served as poetry editor for the school’s Art and Letters journal.
Her poems frequently center death and loss but have been described as fierce and humorous. Friman is an observer of nature and incorporates language into her works to reflect that imagery. She states she “is often at odds with the real and the imagined”. In 1978, she published A Question of Innocence, a chapbook of poems, and three other chapbooks followed. In 1994, she published her first full-length collection, Reporting from Corinth.
Friman’s poetry has won numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry in 2012 for Vinculum, three prizes form the Poetry Society of America, and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award. She received the James Boatwright Prize in 2001 from Shenandoah, first prize in Abiko Quarterly’s 1994 International Poetry Contest (Japan), the Erika Mumford Prize in 1990 and 2008, and many more.
Her most recent work, On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems, was released February 2024 by the LSU Press, and is the winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize in 2025.
The Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a part of the University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries, holds Alice Friman's papers, including correspondence with her family, and drafts and proofs of her published writings.