Laura Kolbe

Writer and poet Laura Kolbe practices medicine and medical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. She studied English and American literature at Harvard and at Jesus College, University of Cambridge before studying medicine at the University of Virginia, where she was an Edward W. Hook Scholar in Humanities and Ethics, and then completed her medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Her poetry collection Little Pharma won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt Poetry Series. It’s been generously reviewed on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, and featured on the Nocturnists podcast, on Virginia Public Radio’s With Good Reason, in Best Coast, Largehearted Boy, and on Montana Public Radio’s The Write Question. Named among the Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2021, it was also one of the favorite books of 2021 of Commonweal book critic Anthony Domestico. The poem “Buried Abecedary for Intensive Care,” published in the New York Times Magazine, was selected by Matthew Zapruder for the anthology Best American Poetry 2022.

Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared recently in The New Yorker, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, and The Yale Review (see bibliography and links here). Her work has been supported by a Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism and by fellowships at MacDowell and the James Merrill House.

She currently serves as Chief of Medical Ethics and Associate Program Director of the internal medicine residency at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. She is also an editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.