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Molly Fisk (born July 16, 1955) 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. [1]
Mary (nickname, "Molly") 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 (Northern Lights) and a Fortune-1000 lender (First National Bank of Chicago) began writing at the age of 35. Her previous work consists of the poetry collections The More Difficult Beauty (Hip Pocket Press, 2010), Listening to Winter (Roundhouse Press/Heyday Books, 2000), Terrain (with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer, Hip Pocket Press, 1998), and the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems (Jungle Garden Press, 1994), the essay collections Naming Your Teeth, Houston, We Have a Possum, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace, and Blow-Drying a Chicken (all Story Street Press).
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 Jeffers Tor House Prize in Poetry, [2] the National Writers Union Prize, and a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She serves as Poet Laureate of Nevada County, California (2017–2019), Hell's Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, radio station KVMR-FM, Nevada City, California, and has appeared at TEDxSanFrancisco [3] and TEDxGrassValley.
Fisk's radio commentary is heard weekly on the News Hour of KVMR-FM (Thursdays, 6:25 p.m. Pacific Time), 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 to 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 to 2006, editing three of their statewide anthologies. [4]
Fisk is the niece by marriage of the American novelist John Updike. Her mother Antoinette Pennington Fisk (1932–2000) was the sister of Updike's first wife, Mary Pennington Updike Weatherall. She is the daughter of Irving Lester Fisk, II (1928–1984) and the granddaughter of ornithologist Erma Johnson Fisk, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce (1957–1961) Bradley Fisk, Unitarian minister Leslie Talbot Pennington, [5] and Elizabeth Daniels Pennington. Fisk's maternal great-grandfather, William Colet Johnson, helped to found Paul Revere Insurance. She dated playwright Oakley Hall III in the 2000s; her poem A Theatrical Death is dedicated to him. [6] [7]
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet laureate, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.
William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008.
Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.
Luisa A. Igloria is a Filipina American poet and author of various award-winning collections, and is the most recent Poet Laureate of Virginia (2020-2022).
Suzanne Lummis is a poet, influential teacher, arts organizer and impresario in Los Angeles. She is associated with the poem noir, as well as the sensibility for which she is a major exponent–a literary incarnation of performance poetry–the Stand-up Poetry of the 80s and 90s. She is also grouped with “The Fresno Poets.”
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994, she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Eleni Sikelianos is an American experimental poet with a particular interest in scientific idiom. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.
Brenda Marie Osbey is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2005 to 2007.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Rosemary Catacalos was the 2013–2014 Texas Poet Laureate. A writer of Mexican and Greek ancestry, Catacalos was the first Latina named to the State post.
Safia Elhillo is a Sudanese-American poet known for her written and spoken poetry. Elhillo received a BA degree from the Gallatin School at New York University and an MFA in poetry from The New School. Elhillo has performed all around the world. She has won acclaim for her work and has been the recipient of several prestigious poetry awards. Elhillo has shared the stage with notable poets such as Sonia Sanchez and has taught at Split This Rock and Tin House Summer Workshop. Currently, she is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist and academic. She is a professor of creative writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her areas of focus include contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.
Mary Pennington (Updike) Weatherall was a visual artist and the first wife of John Updike. Many of Updike's early characters were modeled after her, particularly in his short stories about the Maple family and his novel Couples. Weatherall was the mother of artist Elizabeth Updike Cobblah and writer David Updike, and the maternal aunt of poet Molly Fisk.
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