Welcome!

Gwen is:
1 part writer
1 part soprano
formerly with Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
Utah Chamber Artists, and
opera role: Queen of the Night
1 part mother & grandmother
1 part-ner in marriage
1 part beekeeper in rural Utah
Too many parts?

Her Story

Gwendolyn “Gwen” 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 a Pushcart Prize nomination, is a Rattle Poetry Prize semi-finalist, and a NORward Prize for Poetry finalist (New Ohio Review). Her work appears in journals and anthologies. Currently, she’s an MFA in Writing candidate at Pacific University.

She’s Director of Literary Outreach on her local arts board and organizes hybrid poetry events. 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. 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.