Holly Peppe

Author, Poet, Teacher, and Literary Executor for Edna St. Vincent Millay

Holly Peppe—author, poet, editor, teacher, and mentor—is a leading authority and literary executor for the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her critical essays about the poet’s life and work appear in the Penguin Classics, Harper’s, and Yale University Press editions of her poems. Peppe also wrote an anti-bullying book for children, Sophie and the Swans, and co-authored two Scholastic books for young adults about Barrington Irving, the first Black pilot and youngest aviator to fly solo around the world, and Mum’s the Word, a memoir about Eve Branson, British philanthropist, child welfare advocate, and mother of Richard Branson, the colorful British entrepreneur.

Peppe served as Director of the English Department at the American College of Rome, Italy in the 1980s before returning to Connecticut to teach film and literature programs for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a Master of Arts in teaching from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of New Hampshire.

In addition to her literary work, Peppe represented individuals and groups committed to education, the arts, health issues, gender equality, and human rights in her thirty-year career as a global media, public relations, and crisis communications strategist. She spent eight years traveling to developing countries with ORBIS International, a nonprofit health organization, before founding her own PR firm in Manhattan, where her clients included the United Nations Office of Children and Armed Conflict. She also managed and promoted a diverse clientele including the acclaimed New York magician Steve Cohen. In earlier years, she taught music at an elementary school in rural Vermont and attended Woodstock, a treasured memory from her hippie days.