Widely published in fiction and nonfiction, Frances is the author of Marilyn Monroe and David Letterman, both part of Chelsea House Publishers’ acclaimed young-adult Pop Culture Legends series. Her essays and articles appear in The Sun magazine, Poets & Writers, Health, Yankee, Natural Health, the San Francisco Chronicle, BeliefNet.com, New Age Journal, the Portland Press Herald, and Body+Soul. Her short stories have been published in Glimmer Train Stories, Fiction, Hope Magazine, Passages North, and the Northeast Journal. She was a finalist for a 2004 Pushcart Prize and a 2003 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and has received the Fellowship in Literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, The Martin Dibner Fellowship for Maine Writers, and an invitation to Washington’s Hedgebrook Writing Retreat.

      Frances was born in San Francisco in 1963 to parents who straddled the philosophical and demographic lines between beatniks and hippies. Food stamps, welfare, and free medical clinics played key parts in the life of her family, which moved 9 times in 17 years, mostly within the confines of the city. She attended Brown University on scholarships, earned a degree in anthropology, then worked in the sciences, the film industry, and as a caterer, window dresser, and musician’s handler before becoming a magazine writer and editor. Frances taught at the Writing Workshop of Bates College in Maine and as Writer in Residence in Rhode Island public schools, and then served as Senior Editor of Body+Soul magazine.