Molly Peacock is an American-Canadianpoet, essayist, biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre literary life also includes memoir, short fiction, and a one-woman show.
Career
Peacock's works include ', a biography of Mary Delany, an 18th-century gentlewoman and a meditation on late-life creativity. The Paper Garden was selected as a book of the year by The Economist, which said of the work, "Like flowers built of a millefeuille of paper, Ms Peacock builds a life out of layers of metaphor." Her latest book of poems is , a collection exploring her evolving relationship with her psychoanalyst who, after a stroke, reclaimed her life through painting. She was a Faculty Mentor at the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program, 2001-13. Molly Peacock is also the author/performer of a one-woman show in poems, "The Shimmering Verge" produced by Louise Fagan Productions, reviewed by Laura Weinert in the New York Times. "She can inhabit a moment with quiet intensity: in a haunting poem about an alcoholic father hovering over her, she fully enters her scene, gripping the folds of fabric around her as if they might swallow her alive." She has published seven collections of poetry, including The Second Blush, love poems from a midlife marriage and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Widely anthologized, her work is included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997 and The Oxford Book of American Poetry, as well as in leading literary journals such as the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Peacock is the author of a memoir, Paradise, Piece By Piece. Her essay on Mrs. Delany, "Passion Flowers in Winter", appeared in The Best American Essays. Other pieces appear in ', Elle, House & Garden, and New York Magazine. She is also the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, Private I: Privacy in a Public World. As President of the Poetry Society of America, Molly Peacock was one of the creators of the Poetry in Motion program; coediting Poetry In Motion: One Hundred Poems From the Subways and Buses. She was also the Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English from 2008–2017, as well as a Contributing Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. Currently, Peacock lives in downtown Toronto with her husband, Michael Groden. She keeps in touch with New York City, her former home, by teaching at the 92nd Street Y every February and March as she has since 1985.
How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle, Riverhead Books, 1999,
Paradise, Piece By Piece, Riverhead Books, 1998,
Edited anthologies
Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Buses and Subways. New York: Norton, 1996.
The Private I: Privacy in a Public World. Saint Paul: Graywolf P, 2001.
The Best Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Tightrope Books, 2008—.
Selected essays
"What the Mockingbird Said." Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Ed. James McCorkle. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990. 343–347.
"One Green, One Blue: One Point about Formal Verse Writing and Another About Women Writing Formal Verse." A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Ed. Annie Finch. Ashland, OR: Story Line P, 1994.
"The Poet As Hybrid Memoirist." The Writer 112.2 : 20–22.
"From Gilded Cage to Rib Cage." After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition. Ed. Annie Finch. Ashland, OR: Story Line P, 1999. 70–78.
"Introduction." The Private I: Privacy in a Public World. vii-ix.
"Sweet Uses of Adversity." The Private I: Privacy in a Public World. 80–94.
"Rhyme and the Line." A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line. Eds. Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. 176–177.
"A Calendar of Affections." Arc Poetry Magazine 65 : 166–171.
"New Formalism at the Millenium." Green Mountains Review 25.1 : 268–272.
