Molly Akin lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she leads a historic library. Her chapbook, Hospice, won the 2024 Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices in Poetry prize. 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 Emily Dickinson Museum, Massachusetts Poetry Festival and Lit Youngstown. Her chapbook, Hospice, won the 2024 Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices in Poetry prize. Recent work appears or is forthcoming from journals including Annulet, Brevity, HAD, Denver Quarterly, Identity Theory, Maudlin House, Moon City Review, New Orleans Review, and s w i f t s.
Upcoming Events:
July 27, Inflectionist Reading Series
Hospice, winner of the Finishing Line Press 2024 New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry
“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
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.
Available from some favorite places in Massachusetts: Eight Cousins, Falmouth, Broadside Bookshop, Northampton, and C’est La Vie, Marblehead. Also available at bookshop.org or wherever you purchase books. Or you can order signed copies directly from me!.
Praise for Hospice
“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 these poems, the reader sojourns across a defamiliarized world, acutely described with a Dickinsonian economy and cataloged, freshly, by Akin’s fine-toothed aesthetic.” –Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract