Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (2017), which was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017 and won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (2020). With Susannah Nevison she co-wrote In the Field Between Us (2020), a collection of epistolary poems. Brown's poems and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, Tin House, the Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vogue, the New York Times, Crazyhorse, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. She has been awarded many fellowships and teaches at Old Dominion University in Virginia.