Laura Crafton Gilpin

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Laura Crafton Gilpin(1950-February 15, 2007) was a poet, nurse, and passionate advocate for patients rights.^[1] She was born in Wisconsin but moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1955. After graduating from the local public school system, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, graduating with a BA in 1972 and Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City with her MFA in 1974.

Laura was chosen by juror and poet William Stafford to receive the Walt Whitman Award in 1976. The award was created to assist poets publishing a first book. She was its second recipient. Her first book, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe was published by Doubleday. The most frequently quoted fragment of a poem from this book, written after a close friend died at an unexpectedly young age, reads:

These things I know:
How the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
so that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring, the rabbits find it
and build their nest
inside the dead tree
so that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

After a brief period working as a writer and teacher with various New York outreach programs, she changed careers, becoming a nurse. She graduated from the New York University School of Nursing in 1981. Laura joined the founding staff of Planetree, an organization dedicated to humanizing patient care in hospitals, which she worked with for over 20 years. Over that time she rose from a night shift nurse to Director of the Planetree Alliance. She was coauthor with Susan Frampton and Patrick Charmel of Putting Patients First: Designing and Practicing Patient-Centered Care.

According to her New York Times obituary, "her indomitable spirit, her kindness, her droll humor, her brilliant intellect and her love of celebrations are legendary."

She died Thursday, February 15th, 2007 in her home in Fairhope, Alabama. She had just completed her second book of poetry, The Weight of a Soul.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe
• Putting Patients First: Designing and Practicing Patient-Centered Care, co-editor, (with Susan Frampton and Patrick Charmel)

[edit] References

Persondata
NAME	Gilpin, Laura Crafton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Writer and nurse
DATE OF BIRTH	1950
PLACE OF BIRTH	Wisconsin
DATE OF DEATH	February 15, 2007
PLACE OF DEATH	Fairhope, Alabama