Eli Flam was the founding editor of Potomac Review, and the author of Alex & the Eagle (CreateSpace 2015), a novel first published in serialized form in 1994 in New Bay Times Weekly (Dale, Maryland). He also wrote poetry.
Flam worked for the U.S. Information Agency in public affairs and cultural affairs for 24 years, retiring in 1988. A native of the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, Flam earned a BA in English from Brooklyn College, then worked as a reporter, and served in the U.S. Army in Puerto Rico, before moving to DC in 1964 for a job with USIA. Government assignments took him to Caracas, Barbados, Buenos Aires, Moscow, and Madrid.
Flam edited the Potomac Review for eight years, and wrote numerous book reviews and essays for area publications in his retirement. His own poetry tended toward word play and outright puns; his motto for the Potomac Review was a good description of the man himself: he was someone both “with a conscience and a sense of humor.”
In a 1999 interview in the Washington Post, Flam said he dedicated himself to editing the Potomac Review “to serve an artistic community that is always in need of another outlet.” They described his home office, then located on the banks of the Port Tobacco River in Maryland, as a landscape of manuscript piles that “occupies tables, cabinet tops, and each square inch of space on the desk.” An appreciation of Flam, published after his death in the Greenbelt News Review by Jim Link, praised him as “a world-traveling, fiercely observant, deeply caring, ink-stained wretch.”
The Homes
11 Pinecrest Court, Greenbelt, MD
Eli Flam
11 Pinecrest Court, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Located in Maryland