This Baltimore resident decided to take writing seriously — and became an award-winning author

Anthony Moll began pursuing a creative arts degree on a whim.

Moll, who uses the pronoun they, was working at a LGBTQ nonprofit in communications and hated the job. They had money to pay for college from the GI Bill after serving in the Army and decided to try writing.

They didn’t know anything about being a working writer and hadn’t written much, other than keeping a journal as a kid. But they met students from the University of Baltimore’s Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program, and liked what they had to say. In 2011, Moll enrolled into the program and their writing career has taken off ever since.

It turned out Moll was a pretty good writer.

Since graduating, they’ve won many awards for their writing, often about gender issues. Their first book — Out of Step: A Memoir — won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction in 2018. This year, their second book — a collection of poems titled You Cannot Save Here — won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize.

The Jean Feldman Poetry Prize is awarded by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House to writers in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. The Washington Writers’ Publishing House is a nonprofit that celebrates the work of poets and fiction writers.

“Anthony Moll’s poems rocket the reader towards their ‘favorite apocalypse,’ and with a voice both energetic and compelling. It reminds us how to hold on to what we love, even as the world is falling apart around us,” said Steven Leyva, assistant professor of English at the University of Baltimore and a member of the poetry judging committee.