Molly Fisk’s great gift is the ability to communicate and inspire a kind of radiant joy.
— Claudia Mills
Welcome! I’m Molly Fisk: poet, essayist, radio commentator, radical life coach. I write as openly and personally as I can about many subjects including love, death, grammar, small towns, lingerie, and the natural world. I was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Nevada County, CA, and an inaugural-year Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.
My work is aimed at getting to the heart of who I am. That’s what I want for you, too. A distillation or paring away until you reach your essence. My life coaching comes out of the Radical Feminist Psychiatry and Transactional Analysis traditions, blended by Julia Kelliher into a practice called Skills for Change. I also help poets and short-form essayists polish their work.
Spending time with me will get you laughing, crying, and thinking. Look around the website and see how you’d like to connect.
photo by Ingrid Nelson
NEWS
New poems in Vox Populi and One Art.
Molly’s book of linked poems set in 1875, Walking Wheel, is forthcoming in Spring 2026 from Red Hen Press.
“…told with the intensity and rhythms of poetry, this familiar story becomes something altogether fresh—a place and time and way of being that, despite the distance from us, feels alive to its very bones.”
Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek.
RECENTLY DISCOVERED REVIEW OF LISTENING TO WINTER
“A powerful, profound, stunning collection. With candor and courage, Fisk tackles one of the toughest subjects for writers of any genre, childhood incest. Poetry, with its deliberate word choices and spare lines, is perhaps the ideal expression for this horror. Fisk strikes a perfect balance between emotional infusion and necessary detachment. Her work is a stellar example of poetry’s own cliche, show don’t tell. With half a line, “white Carter Spanky Pants, size 6x” (Moment), Fisk induces a visceral reaction. There is a fascinating juxtaposition in this book, with poems of adult erotic encounters also included. These are skillfully crafted in-your-face, raw poems, yet Fisk’s total command of language makes them sing. I keep picking this book up, re-reading. These are some of the poems I’m especially drawn to: “Neighbor,” “Ford F150,” “Couples,” “Veterans,” “This is the Story of My Life,” “The View From Here.” Buy this book. Read it. Read it again, then share it with everybody you know.
Nina, on Goodreads
Upcoming Events
Friday, April 25, 2025
5 -7 p.m.
Ekphrastic Fantastic reading
Molly reads with many poets writing about art
Artists Studio in the Foothills (ASiF)
940 Idaho Maryland Rd.
Grass Valley
Books
Coaching
I’m a certified Skills for Change Life Coach who runs groups and sees individuals, couples, and families privately. I hold an MBA from Simmons College Graduate School of Management and have run small businesses in the retail, financial, and creative sectors since 1978.
