Tuesday, November 18, 2008
7 p.m.
Monroe Lecture Center Theater
California Avenue, South Campus

Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, both published by W.W. Norton and Company. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, as well as other leading literary journals. Widely anthologized, her poems appear in The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

She is also the author of a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece, published by Riverhead Books, and the editor of a collection of essays on privacy, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World published by Graywolf Press. Her essay “Passion Flowers in Winter” appears in The Best American Essays, 2007. Other essays have appeared in Elle, House & Garden, Creative Nonfiction, New York Magazine, and O the Oprah Magazine.

As well as writing both poetry and literary nonfiction, Ms. Peacock is the writer/actor of a one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, which toured the U.S. and Canada, including an off-Broadway showcase. Former president of the Poetry Society of America, she was a co-creator of the Poetry in Motion program on New York City’s subways and buses. She then served as poet-in-residence at the American Poets’ Corner, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Ms. Peacock has given readings throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain and has been poet-in-residence at Bucknell University, Elliston Poet at the University of Cincinnati, and Regents Poet at the University of California, Riverside. Among her honors are fellowships from the Danforth, Ingram Merrill and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, This year she holds a fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center to write about 18th century flower collage artist Mrs. Mary Delany. Ms. Peacock serves on the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her Web site is: www.mollypeacock.org.