Celebrate the launch of Michele Wolf’s newest poetry collection, Peacocks on the Streets, with a party and a reading on Saturday, September 6, at , from 2 to 4 p.m.! Joining Michele will be Margaret McCarthy, author of In the Becoming: Poems on the Deirdre Story.

Peacocks on the Streets reflects on what is wild and unpredictable in our lives — both what is harsh and what is glorious — and how we find the resolve to triumph after trauma. The collection addresses subjects ranging from pandemic bereavement, hate crimes, and terrorism, to falling in love at midlife, adopting a child, and caring for a parent stolen by dementia. Social justice is a repeated theme, as is the parent-child bond. Warm and companionable, Peacocks on the Streets offers a keen sense of the privilege of being alive. 

“Every moment of these powerful and evocative poems is embedded with honest-to-life reflections on loss in relation to the perseverance of the human spirit,” says poet Richard Blanco about Peacocks on the Streets. “Wolf awakens in us the beauty of witnessing all the tender as well as devastating moments that serve all our lives. As Anaïs Nin noted, writers ‘taste life twice,’ and Wolf does this phenomenally, recapturing the rich and complicated tapestries of a wild life fully lived.”

Michele Wolf is the author of the poetry collections Peacocks on the Streets, Immersion, Conversations During Sleep, and the chapbook The Keeper of Light. Her poems have been featured in The Southern Review, Poetry, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. Among her honors are the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, a Maryland State Arts Council literary arts Independent Artist Award, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and fellowships from Yaddo, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Montgomery County, Maryland, Arts and Humanities Council. She teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda and lives in Gaithersburg. Her website is http://michelewolf.com.

Margaret McCarthy is the author of In the Becoming: Poems on the Deirdre Story (Broadstone Books, 2024) and Beloved: Photo-Tanka Meditations (Broadstone Books, 2025), her collaboration with bilingual Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock. Her chapbook Notebooks from Mystery School  (Finishing Line Press, 2016) was a New Women’s Voices Award finalist. Her poems and dramatic monologues have appeared in international literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including The Pagan Muse: Poems of Ritual and Inspiration, Working Papers in Irish Studies, Cyphers Magazine (Ireland), The Albero Project (Italy) Poetry New Zealand, Gargoyle, and the HIV Here & Now Project (online). She lives in New York City. Her website is http://margaretmccarthy.com.