Laura Gilpin

Born in Wisconsin in 1950 and raised in Indiana, Laura Gilpin graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, then received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her first collection, The Hocus Pocus of the Universe (1977), won the 1976 Walt Whitman Award, judged by William Stafford. Gilpin also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. After teaching creative writing at the New York Public Library, she studied nursing at NYU and, in 1981, became a registered nurse. She worked in pediatric nursing at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and in adult oncology at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center, before becoming a founding staff member at Planetree, a nonprofit dedicated to developing and implementing a patient-centered model of care in hospitals. The Weight of a Soul, Gilpin's second—and final—collection, was published in 2008. She died of glioblastoma in 2007.