Robert Lowes

Robert Lowes is a writer whose poetry has appeared in The New Republic, December, Tampa Review, Southern Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Christian Century, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and other publications. His first collection of poetry, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), was published in 2020. His second collection, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books) came out in 2024. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

A retired journalist, he reported on the healthcare industry for more than 30 years, mostly notably as a staff writer for Medscape Medical News and Medical Economics. He covered a wide range of topics—healthcare reform, electronic health records, malpractice litigation, ethics, pharmaceuticals, medical education, infectious diseases like Zika and Ebola, Medicare fraud, and the opioid abuse epidemic, to name a few.

As an independent journalist, he investigated white supremacist groups, profiled university presidents and newspaper publishers, and detailed the lives of career waiters.

For nine years, he coordinated the annual high school poetry contest of the St. Louis Poetry Center, recruiting judges such as Jericho Brown and Naomi Shihab Nye, screening entries, and shaking the hands of winners. In this role, he also led poetry workshops in area high schools.