Bessie F. Collins was a freelance writer, poet, and essayist who lived in the San Diego area from the 1970s through the early-1980s. The collection consists of her published and unpublished poems, essays, and plays as well as newspaper clippings and awards associated with those works.

Bessie F. Collins was born Elizabeth "Bessie" Friedman on December 24, 1905, in Russia. She immigrated with her family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1907. Collins began writing at the age of nine and had her first work published by age fifteen. In 1932, she married Samuel A. Collins, a mechanical engineer, and had a son named David in 1937. The family lived in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Santa Monica, California before moving to San Diego in the early-1970s. In Delaware, Collins was a member of the Wilmington Drama League where she acted in small roles and submitted her own plays for performance. In the early 1960s, Collins entered a poem into a radio contest titled, "Second Honeymoon," that won she and her husband a second honeymoon to Bermuda.

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The Bessie F. Collins collection is the physical property of the University of San Diego, Archives and Special Collections. Copyright, except in cases where material has passed into the public domain, belongs to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns.

This collection is open for research.