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.

Soper has been honored with the following:
a nomination for a Pushcart Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize semi-finalist, NORward Prize for Poetry finalist (New Ohio Review), and Billy Collins long-listed one of her poems for the Fish Poetry Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, New Ohio Review, Subtropics, Atticus Review, Plant-human Quarterly, The Hopper, and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in RED (Jambu Press), and elsewhere. She has been a guest speaker on the The Poetry Space podcast.

Currently, she’s an MFA in Writing candidate at Pacific University. Undergraduate studies: Newlane University.

She is the Director of Literary Outreach on her local arts board and organizes poetry events. For more fun, every year she enjoys being one of several marathon readers at Amherst’s Tell it Slant Festival performing the complete works of Emily Dickinson in five days. Lastly, A poster of her poem, “Cast Iron” was part of Stuck Up: a collaborative effort in Scotland, by Nuart Aberdeen, to create the world’s longest paste-up wall of poetry and art. A poster of her poem is on that wall.

She lives in rural Utah with her husband. Her greatest joys are spending time with family and her poetry community.