Who is Alvin Abram?
ABRAM is a storyteller, writer and graphic designer of books. He returned to the dream of his youth in 1995, attending York University Creative Fourth Year Writing Course, followed by an Outline Course in 1996 at University of Toronto, finishing with a Creative Summer Writing Course in 1997 at Humber College. He was a volunteer for The Survivors of the Shoah, the organization created by Stephen Spielberg. He refined his craft of listening to stories, gleaning first hand knowledge and insight from their experiences, knowing how to keep an audience interested and entertained by telling his tales with a passion for the events he unfolds.
ABRAM has had almost one hundred speaking engagements since he began his writing career in 1995, been reviewed by newspapers in Canada, U.S. and Israel and interviewed on radio, television and newspapers. He speaks to school children and adults on a full range of topics including the steps needed to be a writer.
ABRAM self-published in 1997 a 244-page hard cover book, The Light After the Dark, six unusual true stories of children who had an experience during the Holocaust that defied logic. In 1998, Key Porter Books bought the rights and the book to-date has been published three times and sold in several countries.
ABRAM self-published in 2000, Why, Zaida? a coloured, fully illustrated hard cover fiction story of a nine-year-old boy asking his grandfather why he has no father or mother. The grandfather uses a squirrel, a dog, a robin, a stick and stream, grass and weeds as metaphors to answer him.
ABRAM self-published in 2001, The Light After the Dark II, a 271-page book with additional true stories of children who had an experience during the Holocaust that defied logic. The royalties are being donated to Jewish charities.
ABRAM self-published in 2002, The Unlikely Victims, a 244-page book about a Jewish homicide detective in Toronto, Gabe Garshowitz. Gabe becomes involved in six fictional cases, most of Jewish background, resolving them as he deals with his own personal problem - aging and the loss of his wife.
ABRAM is self-publishing in 2003, a book of eighteen short stories from the thirty stories and articles that have been published since 1997 that appeared in anthologies, newspapers and tabloids entitled, Stories I Wrote. In this book are some of the stories that are read during his speaking engagements, including The Photograph Album, which appears in Chicken Soup for the Parent's Soul and The Coat that Wouldn't Die, which has been published six times.
ABRAM continues to write. He has completed a novella, A Bone to Pick On, a Gabe Garshowitz mystery as well as two new murder mystery/love stories entitled An Eye For An Eye, hopefully to be released in the winter of 2003 and The Minyan, to be released in 2004. Is working on another murder mystery novel, . . . And The Beat Goes On, another Gabe Garshowitz novel.