Molly Peacock is an American-Canadian poet, essayist, biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre work includes memoir, short fiction, and a one-woman show. She has written on a wide variety of subjects, including the choice to be childfree, widowhood, poetry education, women artists, friendship, and aging.

Peacock is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Her poetry appears in leading literary journals, among them The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and in Canada, The Walrus. Her latest poetry collection is The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton), a book-length sequence of poems charting widowhood in the twenty-first century. Her works include A Friend Sails in on a Poem, a memoir with poems about her half-century friendship 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; and a one-woman staged monologue in poems, The Shimmering Verge.

She is the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, a former President of the Poetry Society of America, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and the creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University, of which she is an alumna, class of ’69. Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Canada Council, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Peacock is also a memoirist and biographer, author of two books about creativity in the lives of women artists Flower Diary and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, named a Book of the Year by Booklist, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The Kansas City Star, The London Evening Standard, MacLean’s, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Sunday Telegraph. 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.

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.

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.