Molly Bendall was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Virginia and The Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, After Estrangement, Dark Summer, Ariadne’s Island, Under the Quick, most recently Watchful from Omnidawn press, and a sixth collection, Turncoat, is forthcoming. She has published a chapbook of translations of the Egyptian-French poet Joyce Mansour from Toad Press (2022). Her collaboration with Gail Wronsky, Bling & Fringe: The L.A. Poems, appeared from What Books.  Her poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Poems for the Millennium, Wide Awake Los Angeles, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, They Said: A Multi-genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. Journals: Paris Review, The New Republic, New American Writing, American Poetry Review, Lana Turner Journal, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, Interim, Volt, Datableed, Recliner Magazine, Pool, L.A. Review of Books, Boston Review, and many others.  

Her critical essay on the poet Christine Hume appeared in Wesleyan University Press’ American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement. She has won the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Lynda Hull Award from Denver Quarterly, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently, she teaches at the University of Southern California. She teaches a wide variety of classes including poetry workshops, Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry and its Forms, Poems of Wastelands and Apocalypse, Poetry with Visual Media, and The Poetry of Women Around the Globe.