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Molly Peacock | |
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| Born | 1947 (age 76–77) Buffalo, New York |
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Molly Peacock (born Buffalo, New York 1947) is an American-Canadian poet, essayist, biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre literary life also includes memoir, short fiction, and a one-woman show.
Peacock's latest book is Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door, a layered memoir and biography that examines the balancing act of female creativity and domesticity in the life of Mary Hiester Reid, a painter who produced over three hundred floral still lifes and landscapes. Critics noted that the biography is written with the "lingering observations and lyrical touch of an established poet, yet with an easygoing, conversational tone often lacking in didactic art biographies." [1] As with The Paper Garden, this "lush and beautifully produced" [2] treatise also tracks Peacock's own marriage with the Joyce scholar Michael Groden.
Peacock's works include The Paper Garden, 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." [3] Her latest book of poems is The Analyst, 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. 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. [4] "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 O: The Oprah Magazine , 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, 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 (Tightrope Books) from 2008 to 2017, [5] as well as a Contributing Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. [6]
Peacock 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.
Peacock was born in Buffalo, New York. Currently, she lives in downtown Toronto and holds dual Canadian-American citizenship. She was married to scholar Michael Groden, who died in March 2021. [7]
Molly Peacock.
Peacock has received recognition from the Leon Levy Center for Biography (CUNY), Danforth Foundation, Ingram Merrill Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. She was President of the Poetry Society of America from 1989 to 1995, and again from 1999 to 2001. She served as Poet in Residence at the American Poets' Corner, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine from 2000 to 2005. Peacock was also Regents' Fellow at University of California, Riverside and Poet in Residence at Bucknell University and the University of Western Ontario.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's home in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even to leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most of her friendships were based entirely upon correspondence.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.
Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
Phyllis Webb was a Canadian poet and broadcaster.
Mary Delany later Mary Pendarves was an English artist, letter-writer, and bluestocking, known for her "paper-mosaicks" and botanic drawing, needlework and her lively correspondence.
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterized by a sincere wonderment and profound connection with the environment, conveyed in unadorned language and simple yet striking imagery. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Maxine Kumin was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982.
Joan Murray is an American poet, writer, playwright and editor. She is best known for her narrative poems, particularly her book-length novel-in-verse, Queen of the Mist; her collection Looking for the Parade which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition, and her New and Selected Poems volume, Swimming for the Ark, which was chosen as the inaugural volume in White Pine Press's Distinguished Poets Series.
Michael Groden was a distinguished professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.
Mary Leapor (1722–1746) was an English poet, born in Marston St. Lawrence, Northamptonshire, the only child of Anne Sharman and Philip Leapor (1693–1771), a gardener. She, out of the many labouring-class writers of the period, was noticeably well received.
Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University.
Marie Ponsot was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. Her awards and honors included the National Book Critics Circle Award, Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, the Robert Frost Poetry Award, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Cathy Song is an American poet who has won numerous awards including the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She uses her heritage, coming from an Asian American culture, as the key compartment for her work.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.
Elizabeth Macklin is an American poet.
April Bernard is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.
Sandra Beasley is an American poet and non-fiction writer.
Mary Augusta Hiester Reid was an American-born Canadian painter and teacher. She was best known as a painter of floral still lifes, some of them called "devastatingly expressive" by a contemporary author, and by 1890 she was thought to be the most important flower painter in Canada. She also painted domesticated landscapes, night scenes, and, less frequently, studio interiors and figure studies. Her work as a painter is related in a broad sense to Tonalism and Aestheticism or "art for art's sake".
Letitia Bushe was an Irish watercolourist and miniaturist.
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