Gwendolyn Soper was born and raised Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is 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 twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, including a nomination from the Pushcart Prize Board of Contributing Editors. She is the winner of the Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. She has also been a finalist for BOMB Magazine’s Poetry Contest, judged by Richard Siken, and the NORward Prize, and a semifinalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Billy Collins long-listed one of her poems for the Fish Poetry Prize.

Gwendolyn’s poems have appeared in Subtropics, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Plant-Human Quarterly, and elsewhere, as well as in each issue of the HUE Anthology series by Jambu Press. Gwendolyn studied poetry in Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program and completed her poetry thesis in 2026.

She is at work on her first full-length poetry manuscript. She serves on her local arts board by organizing poetry events—most recently a reading by Paisley Rekdal in celebration of her book, West: A Translation. Gwendolyn is also the founder and administrator of a poetry group with nearly 1,000 members. She has appeared on The Poetry Space podcast with Katie Dozier, and Rattle editor Timothy Green.

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 either peck for grubs — or run like church ladies to get out of the rain.