Laura Kolbe

Biography

Laura Kolbe is a writer, physician, and medical ethicist in New York City. Her debut poetry collection, Little Pharma (Pittsburgh, 2021), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her work has been awarded the Iowa Review Prize and featured in Best American Poetry, and has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and the James Merrill House.

See Work

ART & THE ARCHIVE / Spring 2024

Social Distortions

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustrations by Pablo Amargo

A camera mutes or sharpens various aspects of self, but it seems that the bigger behavioral nudge was not the time spent in front of the camera but rather the experience of watching their life flipped back upon them. Is there such a thing...

Illustration by Pablo Amargo
ART & THE ARCHIVE / Winter 2023

Land Lines

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustration by Pablo Amargo

Reality Beyond Realism in the Paintings of Edvard Munch
ART & THE ARCHIVE / Fall 2023

Tiny Fissures

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustration by Pablo Amargo

My first act of writing, after having a baby in early January of this year, was a February journal entry. I do not keep journals—my essays and poems mark time for me. But sometimes we are hurled toward what we normally don’t do.
ART & THE ARCHIVE / Winter 2022

Translators and Alchemists

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustration by Rachel Levit-Ruiz

As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...
ART & THE ARCHIVE / Fall 2022

Safe as Houses

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustration by Rachel Levit-Ruiz

Bodies Under Siege in American Art
ART & THE ARCHIVE / Summer 2022

The Post That Stays

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustration by Rachel Levit-Ruiz

Traveling in Italy and Greenland in my teens and early twenties with a fitful and rudimentary cell phone, an impatience with the sweaty, masculine funk of internet cafés, and only the haziest notion of planning, I adored and relied on the...

Illustration by Rachel Levit-Ruiz
REPORTING / Summer 2016

Once Bitten

By Laura Kolbe ,  Illustrations by Victo Ngai

Hundreds of thousands of cases of dengue fever have been reported in Puerto Rico, and yet little attention has been paid to the problem. In 2009 and 2010, the eighty-eight recorded dengue cases in Key West were the serious inducement needed...