Lisa Wells is a poet, essayist, and documentarian. She is the author, most recently, of The Fire Passage, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the Levis Poetry Prize (Four Way Books, 2025). Her debut poetry collection, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a finalist for the 2022 PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her work has been published in Granta, The Believer, N+1, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She has taught for The University of Iowa, The University of Arizona, Portland State University, Yale-NUS and currently serves as co-editor of the Kuhl House Poets Series at the University of Iowa Press.

Find more here:

https://www.lisawellswriter.com/

As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited:

https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-online

For links to all the past episodes, visit:

https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/

This Week’s Prompt:

Write an after poem to one of the Rattle Poetry Prize finalist poems. Make sure not to take the magic from the source poem. Instead, create your own transformation!

Next Week’s Prompt:

Write a poem that’s all about taste! Include a scent, but not the word “delicious.”

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