Carol Moldaw is an American lyric poet. Her seventh book of poetry, Go Figure, was published in 2024. Her other books are Beauty Refracted; So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems; The Lightning Field, which won The FIELD Prize; Through the Window; Chalkmarks on Stone; Taken from the River; and a novella, The Widening.

Moldaw is the recipient of several literary honors including a Merwin Conservancy Artist Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. Published widely, her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Triquarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review.

“Carol Moldaw is a treasured poet, a master of lyric intensity . . . Moldaw’s work is a fascinating act of exploration. The world she discovers is dazzling and scary, haunted and generous, ‘flagrant with expectancy.’ . . . Its mystery and urgency are breathtaking—like seeing fire for the first time.”

— Dennis Nurkse

Moldaw’s poems have been anthologized in Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets, The Language of Birds: International Poetry Anthology, An Anthology of California Poets, and New Poets of the American West, as well as other anthologies. Her poetry has also been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, and Turkish, and a volume of her selected poems, translated into Chinese, is forthcoming from Guangxi Normal University Press in Beijing in 2025. Moldaw’s reviews and essays have been widely published as well, in journals including The Antioch Review, Lana Turner, and Partisan Review, and in critical volumes including Contemporary Literary Criticism no. 171 and Critical Essays on Louise Bogan.

As a teacher of creative writing, Moldaw has taught at Santa Fe Workshops, Naropa University, the College of Santa Fe, and Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency MFA program. She has been a recurrent Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center and served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.

Moldaw has read her poetry throughout the United States and in India and China. Currently, she teaches privately and is available for poetry readings, educational events, workshops, and private mentoring, both remotely and in person. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband, the poet Arthur Sze.