Carol Moldaw


Carol Moldaw is an American poet, novelist and critic. Her book The Lightning Field won the FIELD Poetry Prize.

Biography

Carol Moldaw was born in Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moldaw holds an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. from Boston University.
Noted for their deep intelligence and lushness of language, Moldaw's poems have been published widely. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, ''The Paris Review, Parnassus, ', Poetry, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review.
Jesse Nathan, in "Short Conversations with Poets" in McSweeney’s, wrote about Go Figure: “The fierceness of the love in these poems, and the lithe music of it, is part of what makes them powerful... And the strange beauty of these poems is in the ease of the forms...” In her review in ', Suzanne Cleary writes, “In a voice both graceful and searing, Moldaw continues to explore the interior world and the global, especially in regard to women.”
About The Lightning Field, Frieda Gardner wrote in '', " courts revelation... in a voice variously curious, passionate, surprised, meditative, and sensual. On the surface of her work are rich sounds and varitations of rhythm and line. A few steps deeper in lie wells of feeling and complexities of thought." A review in The New Yorker of Chalkmarks on Stone noted her work "repeatedly achieves lyric junctures of shivering beauty," calling Moldaw's poems "oblique, wily, and intensely intelligent." D. Nurkse called Moldaw “a treasured poet, a master of lyric intensity," observing her work as "a fascinating act of exploration." “Here are poems of intelligent consideration and a deft and heart-born music," wrote acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield, "filled with the gleam of particularity and a lushness of language and substance.”
Moldaw’s prose has also been published in numerous journals and magazines including, The Antioch Review, The Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review and Plume. Her poems have been anthologized in Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925–2025, Pushcart Prize XLVI: Best of the Small Presses and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets'', and her work has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and Turkish.
Moldaw is the recipient of several literary distinctions including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency and a Merwin Conservancy Artist Residency.
While never a full-time academic, Moldaw has taught creative writing in a number of programs across the US, including the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the creative writing program at the College of Santa Fe. She was a Visiting Writer at Bucknell University's Stadler Center for Poetry and the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Moldaw has taught workshops at the, Vermont Studio Center and Naropa University.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband, Arthur Sze, and their daughter.

Books

Poetry

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Fiction

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Honors and awards

Website

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Articles and Interviews

Selected writings

Harvard ReviewPoetry
  • Poetry Society of America, with commentary on the poemPoem-A-Day, The Academy of American PoetsPoem-A-Day, The Academy of American PoetsPoem-A-Day, The Academy of American Poets
  • Vox PopuliThe Yale Review, Poem of the Week
  • Excerpt from
  • "The Click and the Wink," American Poetry Review vol. 53 no. 5, September/October 2024
  • "The Bottom Line", AGNI 72, Fall 2018
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