Laura Kolbe

Writer and poet Laura Kolbe practices and teaches medicine and medical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center. She studied English at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge before studying medicine at the University of Virginia, where she was an Edward W. Hook Scholar in Humanities and Ethics. She completed her medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has taught poetry and creative writing in a variety of settings, most recently at the Brooklyn Writer’s Foundry MFA program of St. Joseph’s University.

Little Pharma (2021), her debut poetry collection, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere (list and links here). She has won the Iowa Review Prize for fiction, the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Prize for poetry, and the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, among other honors. Her work has been supported by a Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism and by fellowships at MacDowell, the James Merrill House, and Millay Arts.

The chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems (2025), designed and illustrated by Becca Josephson, was selected by Kwame Dawes as the annual contest winner of the Center for Book Arts.

Her next book, The Decadent Movement, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh in Fall 2026.