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 New Ohio Review, Subtropics, Nine Mile Press, The Hopper and elsewhere. This includes 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 the founder and administrator of a large, global poetry society for fans of the poet Billy Collins.

In 2022 she led a poetry prompt at Elizabeth Boquet’s 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 sweetheart are beekeepers in rural Utah. They also maintain a certified Monarch butterfly way-station on land they inhabit on the unceded land of the Núuchiu, meaning “The People.” Of great joy are visits from their three grown children, and grandchildren. Gwendolyn also works at raising hens, alpacas, orchard trees, and mental health awareness.