Sandra M. Gilbert (1936—2024) was a distinguished literary critic and poet. Together with Susan Gubar, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the NBCC.

"The poems in Sandra Gilbert's Blood Pressure seem, to me, to be a triumph of exquisite learning. . . . Over and over, [she] chronicles her 'cool sensual descent' into the fertile dark underworld of Dionysian creativity, which, like her Sicilian aunts' Brooklyn summer kitchen, becomes 'the cool root' of her poetry."