a hearth for Jewish poetry

Carol Moldaw

Private Teaching/Self-employed

Birth Year
b. 1956
Current City
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Birth City
Oakland, California, USA
Genre(s)
Poetry, Fiction, Literary Criticism
Author’s Website
Author Reading
Photo credit: Photo credit: Gabriella Marks, 2016

Biography

Carol Moldaw is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024), and one novella, The Widening (Etruscan Books, 2008). Her poetry collection The Lightning Field (Oberlin Press, 2002) won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, and Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001) was translated into Turkish and published in a bi-lingual edition in Istanbul. A volume of her selected poems translated into Chinese is forthcoming from Guangxi Normal University Press (Beijing) in 2025. In 2022, Moldaw was an artist-in-residence at the Merwin Conservancy in Maui. She is also the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work is published widely in journals, including American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, Subtropics, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. As noted in The New Yorker, Moldaw’s work “repeatedly achieves lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” About The Lightning Field, Frieda Gardner wrote in The Women’s Review of Books: “She courts revelation . . . in a voice variously curious, passionate, surprised, meditative, and sensual. On the surface of her work are rich sound and variation of rhythm and line. A few steps deeper in lie wells of feeling and complexities of thought.” From 2005-2008 Moldaw was on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency M.F.A. program, and she has been a recurrent Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University. In the spring of 2011, she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Currently, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches privately. A complete list of her books can be found at www.carolmoldaw.com.

Published Works

Poetry
Go Figure
(Forthcoming; Four Way Books, 2024)
Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018)
So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems
(Etruscan Press, 2010)
The Lightning Field (Oberlin College Press, 2003)
Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001)
Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press, 1998)
Taken from the River (Alex Books, 1993)

Prose
The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008)

Links to Sample Works

      

Languages of Publication(s) and Poets Translated

Russian (with crib from the Russian): Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova

Subject Matter

Aging, Art & Ekphrasis, Childhood, Death, Family, Friendship, Grief & Elegy, Jewish Mysticism, Love, Marriage, Motherhood/Fertility, Mythology, Nature, Parenting, Sexuality, Feminism, Translation.