Carol Moldaw

Carol Moldaw (born 1956) is an American poet, novelist and critic. Her book The Lightning Field (2003) won the FIELD Poetry Prize.

Carol Moldaw was born in 1956, in Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.^[1] Her father Stuart G. Moldaw was a noted businessperson, and philanthropist, he started a venture capital firm and various retail companies including Ross Stores, and Gymboree.^[2]

Moldaw received an A.B. degree in 1979 from Radcliffe College (now Harvard College), and an M.A. degree from Boston University.^[1]

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, Poem-A-Day, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review.

Moldaw’s prose has also been published in numerous journals and magazines including AGNI Magazine, 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 (McGraw-Hill), A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker 1925–2025 (Knopf), Pushcart Prize XLVI: Best of the Small Presses and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets (Anchor), 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, and a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s 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 (now Santa Fe University of Art and Design). 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 Taos Summer Writers' Conference, Vermont Studio Center and Naropa University.

She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband, Arthur Sze, and their daughter.^[3]

• Moldaw, Carol (1993). Taken from the River. New York, NY: Alef Books. ISBN 978-1882509003.^[4]
• Moldaw, Carol (1998). Chalkmarks on Stone. Albuquerque, NM: La Alameda Press. ISBN 978-1888809077.^[5]
• Moldaw, Carol (2001). Through the Window. Albuquerque, NM: La Alameda Press. ISBN 978-1888809305.
• Moldaw, Carol (2003). The Lightning Field. Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press. ISBN 978-0932440945.^[6]
• Moldaw, Carol (2010). So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press. ISBN 978-0981968728.^[7]
• Moldaw, Carol (2018). Beauty Refracted. New York, NY: Four Way Books. ISBN 978-1945588075.
• Moldaw, Carol (2024). Go Figure. New York, NY: Four Way Books. ISBN 978-1961897045.^[8]

• Moldaw, Carol (2008). The Widening. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press. ISBN 978-0974599595.^[7][9]

• National Endowment for the Arts, creative writing fellowship in poetry, 1994^[10]
• FIELD Poetry Prize, Oberlin College, 2002^[6][11]
• Pushcart Poetry Prize, 2002
• Lannan Foundation, Marfa writers residency, 2006
• Merwin Conservancy, artist-in-residence in Hawaii, 2022

• Official website

• "Short Conversations with Poets: Carol Moldaw" by Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, January 7, 2025
• "Carol Moldaw: Interviewed by Olivia Burnett," Subtropics
• "Then. And Since Then" by Jon Davis, Santa Fe Reporter, April 15, 2014
• "Bad Girls: An Interview with Carol Moldaw and Abigail DeWitt," VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, January 9, 2013
• "An Interview With Carol Moldaw," Sou'wester Magazine, Spring 2009
• "'The Impersonal Intimate': A Conversation with Carol Moldaw," interviewed by Tyler Mills, May 12, 2000
• "Beauty Refracted by Carol Moldaw," reviewed by Irina Moga in Split Rock Review’s Shoreline
• Smith, Tracey, “For a Lost Fragment,” The Slowdown
• Spaar, Lisa Russ, “Monday’s Poem: ‘A Leaf’s Gravity,’ by Carol Moldaw,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20, 2011

• “Night Piece,” (June 10, 2022), Harvard Review

• “From the Roof Deck,” (July 2022), Poetry Foundation

• ”Painter and Model (I),” Poetry Society of America, with commentary on the poem

• “Meditation in the Open-Air Garage,” (2021) Poem-A-Day, The Academy of American Poets

• “Meditation on the Veranda,” (2020) Poem-A-Day, The Academy of American Poets

• “Arthritis,” (2018) Poem-A-Day, The Academy of American Poets

• ”Game Face,” (April 10, 2023) Vox Populi

• “Shoe Box,” (July 21, 2021) The Yale Review, Poem of the Week

• "64 Panoramic Way" (2002) ANGI Magazine, Boston University
• Excerpt from The Widening (Summer 2008), Narrative Magazine
• Three poems (Fall 2008), Narrative Magazine
• Twelve Poems from Through the Window (November 1998), Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, No. 5
• "The Click and the Wink," American Poetry Review, vol. 53, no. 5, September/October 2024
• "The Bottom Line" (Essay) (Fall 2018), ANGI Magazine, No. 72, Boston University
• Molossus: World Poetry Portfolio #9 (January 10, 2011) by Sudeep Sen, Molossus