LISTEN to my November 18th, 2025 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring renowned, groundbreaking poet Molly Peacock. Molly will read from her acclaimed books and discuss her life as a poet, biographer and arts activist.
Molly Peacock is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box. Her poems appear in leading literary journals such as Poetry and American Poetry Review and are anthologized in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. She is the cofounder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. After her husband of 28 years died, she began The Widow’s Crayon Box, realizing that the variety of feelings after a beloved partner dies comprise far more than an 8-color crayon box—it’s the whole 152. A former Leon Levy Biography Fellow, Peacock is also the author of two biographies about the lives of women artists, The Paper Garden and Flower Diary.
PRAISE FOR MOLLY PEACOCK
“Peacock has a luxuriantly sensual imagination—and an equally sensual feel for the language. In mood her poems range from high-spirited whimsy ... to bemused reflection. ... Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of her baton.” - David Lehman writing in Washington Post Book World
“Ms. Peacock uses rhyme and meter as a way to cut reality into sizeable chunks, the sense of the poem spilling from line to line, breathlessly.” - The New York Times Book Review
[The Widow’s Crayon Box] bears ample witness to [Molly Peacock’s] wit and gusto, her sensuousness and curiosity, and her courage . . . Her poetic artistry, honed over the course of her distinguished career, enables her to find beauty and zest even in the most forbidding places—and having found them, to offer them to us. — Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest