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. She recently returned to her hometown of Portland, Oregon where once upon a time she was an enthusiastic teenage artist at summer camp.
