Molly Fisk is an American poet and radio commentator. She has been teaching writing since 1994 and runs the on-line workshop Poetry Boot Camp. Her most recent book is Naming Your Teeth: Even More Observations from a Working Poet. She was honored as an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2019.
Biography
Mary Elizabeth Fisk was born July 16, 1955. Originally from San Francisco, Fisk earned her B.A. cum laude from Radcliffe College/ Harvard University in Folklore & Mythology, her M.B.A. with honors from Simmons College Graduate School of Management, and after working as a sweater designer/manufacturer and a Fortune-1000 lender began writing at the age of 35. Her previous work consists of the poetry collections The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, Terrain, and the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems, the essay collections Naming Your Teeth, Houston, We Have a Possum, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace, and Blow-Drying a Chicken. Fisk has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Marin Arts Council. Her prizes include the Dogwood Prize, the Robinson JeffersTor House Prize in Poetry, the National Writers Union Prize, and a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She serves as Poet Laureate of Nevada County, California, Hell's Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, radio stationKVMR-FM, Nevada City, California, and has appeared at TEDxSanFrancisco and TEDxGrassValley. Fisk's radio commentary is heard weekly on the News Hour of KVMR-FM, and is carried on community stations in Illinois, Colorado, Wisconsin, and California. Fisk teaches creative writing classes on-line and works privately as a Life Coach in the Skills for Change tradition. She has taught Writing to Heal, a technique that boosts the immune system, to cancer patients at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital since 2000. She taught creative writing at U.C. Davis Extension from 1997–2003, and edited The Healing Woman, a newsletter for childhood sexual abuse survivors, from 1997 to 2000. She taught with California Poets in the Schools from 1993–2006, editing three of their statewide anthologies. Fisk is the niece by marriage of the American novelist John Updike. Her mother Antoinette Pennington Fisk was the sister of Updike's first wife, Mary Pennington Updike Weatherall. She is the daughter of Irving Lester Fisk, II and the granddaughter of ornithologist Erma Johnson Fisk, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Bradley Fisk, Unitarian minister Leslie Talbot Pennington, and Elizabeth Daniels Pennington. Fisk's maternal great-grandfather, William Colet Johnson, helped to found Paul Revere Insurance.
