Molly Akin

Hospice, winner of the Finishing Line Press 2024 New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry

Release Date: September 26, 2025

Preorder by August 1 for 15% off

“With lightness and depth, this collection unravels the sacred contradictions that sustain us, the ones embedded in being alive, of mothering, of losing and loving, again and again.”
–Tatiana Johnson-Boria, author of Nocturne in Joy

“In a lean but hard-hitting, visceral verse, Akin ardently depicts what it is like dealing with the loss of a mother, void and haunting memory. A strong, memorable debut collection!”
–Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Parachutist and Bad Mexican, Bad American

“... the poet dares also to look closely at her own flesh, her image a “coiled / Siren,” her body also a mother’s body, aging, resilient, pained, ancestral, capable, moving through time: “One big contraction,” she writes, “And it is our life / Looking back.”
–Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract

Hospice catalogs a decade in the poet’s life marked by becoming a mother while supporting a terminally ill parent, reckoning with the intimate work of caregiving. Formal explorations grapple with the twinned dynamics of mothering and motherlessness. Throughout the collection, Molly Akin considers how we trace our origins and inheritance within the imperfections of memory. Hospice employs precise and deliberate syntax to examine universally human and deeply personal themes. 

Molly Akin is a writer and nonprofit library director on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her first collection, Hospice, is now available for pre-order with a September 26, 2025, release date.

Molly was a featured reader along with Jane Huffman and Diane Seuss during the 2024 Tell it Slant poetry festival hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum. She has read in other venues, including the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Wilder Words, Fine Arts Work Center, and New England Poetry Club.  Molly is a 2023 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and her writing has been supported by the Sundress Academy for the Arts and Fine Arts Work Center.

A semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Prize, Molly’s work has been published or is forthcoming from Brevity, Identity Theory, Inflectionist Review, Paraselene, and Tulip Tree.