Ina Donna Coolbrith

Biography current as of induction in 2024

A niece of Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith, Coolbrith was born Josephine Donna Smith in the Mormon community of Nauvoo, Illinois. After the expulsion of Mormons from Nauvoo and the start of the Gold Rush, her family went west. Reading Lord Byron and Shakespeare on her way to California by covered wagon, the 11-year-old fell in love with poetry. As a schoolgirl in then-small-town Los Angeles, she had her own poems published in the local newspaper under the pseudonym “Ina.” After a short, abusive marriage that ended in divorce, at age 21 she adopted the name Ina Coolbrith and moved north to start anew. For the rest of her life, she never spoke of her Mormon roots, marriage, or a baby who had died in infancy.

Making her home in San Francisco in 1862, Coolbrith taught school and wrote poems that avoided the sentimentality expected of women of her time. She became a respected contributor to the Overland Monthly and other literary magazines and a leading figure in the male-dominated San Francisco literary circle that included Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce.

In 1878 Coolbrith became the first librarian of the newly public Oakland Free Library, where she mentored young readers Jack London and Isadora Duncan. Despite working 70-hour workweeks during her 19-year tenure, she published A Perfect Day (1881), then, after leaving the library, Songs from the Golden Gate (1895), establishing herself as a dominant poetic presence in the West.

When California crowned Coolbrith its first poet laureate at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, she also became the nation’s first state laureate. Four years later, the legislature officially confirmed the honor, which she held until her death. Coolbrith moved to Roaring Twenties Manhattan at 78 and for four years wrote poetry for her final collection, Wings of Sunset, while living in a hotel.

Coolbrith has been widely memorialized, with a park in San Francisco, a path in Berkeley, and a mountain in the Sierra Nevada named for her.  In 2015, an award-winning biography about her was published, and today the Ina Coolbrith Circle, a literary society, continues her mission to nurture the poetry and history of the Golden State.