© Photo: Leone Brander
Molly McCloskey was born in Philadelphia and grew up in North Carolina and Oregon. She lived in Ireland for 25 years and now resides in Washington, D.C. She is the author of two short story collections, Solomon’s Seal and The Beautiful Changes, and a novel, Protection. Her first work of non-fiction, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, appeared in 2011. Her latest novel, Straying (2018), is published in the US by Scribner and by Penguin in the UK and Ireland, where it appeared as When Light is Like Water.
Her work has appeared in the The New Yorker, the Irish Times, the Dublin Review, the Guardian, McSweeney’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at universities in Ireland and the US, including Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, and George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has also worked in the field of international development in the UN’s Kenya-based Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia. She holds an MA in Philosophy from University College Dublin and an MFA from Boston University.