Her Story

Gwendolyn Soper was born and raised Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah. She’s the daughter of an artist mother, and an orthopedic surgeon father who died by suicide when she was six years old. After that, she began to retreat to the gully behind her home where she would explore the mill creek, and sit under scrub oak to ponder. Her poetic interior landscape began to take shape in those woods.

Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, once by New Ohio Review and again by members of the Pushcart Board of Contributing Editors; she was named a semi-finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, a finalist for the NORward Prize, awarded by New Ohio Review, and Billy Collins long-listed one of her poems for the Fish Poetry Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Subtropics, Rattle, The Hopper, Plant-human Quarterly, Nine Mile and elsewhere, as well as the HUE Anthology series by Jambu Press.

Currently, Gwendolyn is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Pacific University and is at work on her first full-length poetry manuscript. She serves on her local arts board by organizing poetry events—most recently featuring Paisley Rekdal. She was a guest on The Poetry Space podcast with Katie Dozier and Timothy Green, of Rattle, and is founder and administrator of a poetry group with nearly 1,000 members.

Each year, Gwendolyn joins Amherst’s Tell It Slant Festival as a marathon reader, performing the complete works of Emily Dickinson over five days with fellow devotees.

She lives in rural Utah with her husband. Her greatest joys are time with her family, her poetry community, and sitting on her favorite tree stump to watch the chickens peck at grubs—then run like church ladies to get out of the rain.