Molly Peacock is an internationally acclaimed poet, author of eight poetry collections. She has also written critically acclaimed biographies and memoirs. 

Molly Peacock was born in Buffalo, New York in 1947 and graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude from Binghamton University and M.A. with honors from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, as a Danforth Foundation Fellow. A distinguished poet, biographer, and creative nonfiction writer, she is the author of eight collections of poems, including The Widow's Crayon Box, Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, and The Analyst.

Her other works include A Friend Sails in on a Poem, a memoir with poems about her half-century friendship in poetry with poet Phillis Levin; a book about reading poetry, How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle, a memoir about her choice to be childfree; Paradise Piece by Piece; a one-woman staged monologue in poems, The Shimmering Verge; and the noted biography The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 as well as a companion biography Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door. Passionate about bringing poetry to the public, Peacock, a former President of the Poetry Society of America, was one of the creators of Poetry in Motion on New York city's subways and buses; she also inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series. Her poems appear in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and many other anthologies.

Peacock is featured in two documentary films about women's choices not to have children, "A Life Outside Convention," and "My So-Called Selfish Life" by Therese Shechter. Her essays have appeared in Elle, Oprah Magazine, and House and Garden, among others. She has read her poetry at numerous colleges, universities, and libraries including the Library of Congress. Over the past century she has received awards from The Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Danforth Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Society for citizens and Scholars, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Peacock has been Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University, University of California, Riverside, Western University, Canada, and the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. For a decade she mentored graduate students at the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program. Modeling her work on the private teaching of music, she has worked privately with poetry students for forty years.

As an editor, she published The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, as well as overseeing the first ten volumes of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.

Peacock is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.