Molly Brodak’s poems have recently appeared in Field, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and Colorado Review. Her first book of poetry, A Little Middle of the Night, won the 2009 Iowa Poetry Prize. In the summer of 1994, when Brodak was thirteen years old, her father robbed eleven banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the “Mario Brothers Bandit” by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars. In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Bandit (Grove Press), Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew.
