page_title: Ina Coolbrith
section_title: Poet laureate
hierarchical_section_title: Ina Coolbrith / Poet laureate
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Ina Coolbrith as appearing in 1918 poetry book.
context_page_description: Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the "Sweet Singer of California", she was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state.
  Coolbrith, born the niece of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith, left the Mormon community as a child to enter her teens in Los Angeles, California, where she began to publish poetry. She terminated a youthful failed marriage to make her home in San Francisco, and met writers Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard with whom she formed the "Golden Gate Trinity" closely associated with the literary journal Overland Monthly. Her poetry received positive notice from critics and established poets such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Alfred Lord Tennyson. She held literary salons at her home in Russian Hill—in this way she introduced new writers to publishers. Coolbrith befriended the poet Joaquin Miller and helped him gain global fame.
context_section_description: In 1911, Coolbrith accepted the presidency of the Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association, and a park was dedicated to her, at 1715 Taylor Street, one block from her pre-earthquake home. Coolbrith was named honorary member of the California Writers Club around 1913, a group that quickly expanded to include Lummis and other Southern Californians. In 1913, Ella Sterling Mighels founded the California Literature Society which met informally once a month at Coolbrith's Russian Hill home, newspaper columnist and literary critic George Hamlin Fitch presiding. Mighels, who has been called California's literary historian, credited her breadth of knowledge to Coolbrith and the society meetings.
  In preparation for the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Coolbrith was named President of the Congress of Authors and Journalists. In this position she sent more than 4,000 letters to the world's most well-known writers and journalists. At the Exposition itself on June 30, Coolbrith was lauded by Senator James D. Phelan who said that her early associate Bret Harte called her the "sweetest note in California literature." Phelan continued, "she has written little, but that little is great. It is of the purest quality, finished and perfect, as well as full of feeling and thought." The Overland Monthly reported that "eyes were wet throughout the large audience" when Coolbrith was crowned with a laurel wreath by Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the University of California, who called her the "loved, laurel-crowned poet of California." After several more speeches were made in her honor, and bouquets brought in abundance to the podium, Coolbrith, wearing a black robe with a sash bearing a garland of bright orange California poppies, addressed the crowd, saying, "There is one woman here with whom I want to share these honors: Josephine Clifford McCracken. For we are linked together, the last two living members of Bret Harte's staff of Overland writers." McCracken was then ushered up from her seat in the audience to join Coolbrith. Coolbrith's official status as California Poet Laureate was confirmed in 1919 as the "Loved Laurel Crowned Poet of California" by the California State Senate with no financial support attached.
  Several months after the San Francisco fair, at the Panama–California Exposition held in San Diego, festivities included a series of Authors' Days, featuring 13 California writers. November 2, 1915, was "Ina Coolbrith Day": her poems were recited, a lecture on her life was given by George Wharton James, and her poetry was set to music and performed on piano and voice, with compositions by James, Humphrey John Stewart, and Amy Beach.
  In 1916, Coolbrith sent copies of her poetry collections to her cousin Joseph F. Smith who publicized her sending them to him and her identity as a niece of Joseph Smith, which upset her. She told him that "To be crucified for a faith in which you believe is to be blessed. To be crucified for one in which you do not believe is to be crucified indeed." She assured him she was not angry but she certainly was not pleased.
  Coolbrith continued to write and work to support herself. From 1909 to final publication in 1917, she painstakingly collected and edited a book of Stoddard's poetry, writing a foreword and joining her short memorial poem "At Anchor" to verse submitted by Stoddard's friends Joaquin Miller, George Sterling and Thomas Walsh. At the age of 80, McCracken wrote to Coolbrith to complain to her dear friend of still having to work for a living: "The world has not used us well, Ina; California has been ungrateful to us. Of all the hundred thousands the state pays out in pensions of one kind and another, don't you think you should be at the head of the pensioners, and I somewhere down below?"
caption: Portrait of Coolbrith from a publication of her poem California, 1918
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