Colleen Abel was born and raised in the Chicagoland area, and she has studied creative writing at universities in the United States and abroad. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has received awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the KHN Center for the Arts, and the Poetry Center of Chicago. Her work has appeared in journals including Heliotrope, Rockhurst Review, Briar Cliff Review, Agenda (U.K.), Bellevue Literary Review, and Branches Quarterly, and is forthcoming in the anthology The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.

Ms. Abel is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and her first book of poems, Woman with Drawers, was recently named a finalist for both the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Four Way Books Intro Prize. She is currently at work on a new manuscript and on a series of postcard collaborations with her husband, the visual artist Tim Abel.