About

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—or as her uncle preferred to say, “took himself off”—when Gwendolyn was six years old. She would retreat to the gully behind their home to explore the mill creek and rest against scrub oak to ponder. Her poetic interior landscape began to take shape in those woods.

Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Subtropics, Nine Mile Press, The Hopper and more, including Stuck Up (a collaborative effort by Nuart Aberdeen, Scotland to create the world’s longest paste-up wall of poetry and art. A poster of her poem, “Cast Iron,” is on that wall). She is founder and administrator of a poetry society for fans of the poet Billy Collins, with seemingly countless members from around the globe.

In 2022 she led a poetry prompt at the Swiss-based Pernessy Poets Workshop using Roger Robinson’s poem, “A Portable Paradise,” as a template for writers to write their own. The collected poems from that workshop are available as a free e-chapbook.

She and her spouse are beekeepers on their small farm in rural Utah—a certified Monarch butterfly way-station they maintain. Of great joy are visits from their three grown children, and grandchildren, and being human butlers to free-range hens, ducks, alpacas, and rabbits.