Photo by Katherine Gunning
Lisa Wells is an author, editor, and videomaker living in Portland, Oregon.
To make a short story longer: I’m the author of two books of poetry, most recently: The Fire Passage, a tragicomic romp through an underworld of mysterious illness, climate catastrophe, fallen empires, and the bizarre history of Western Medicine. It was selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the Levis Poetry Prize and was published by Four Way Books in 2025. My debut poetry collection, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize (2018) and was described in a starred review in Publishers Weekly as “a brilliant, taut, terrifying debut that renders the parts of the inner and outer world for which there is no real cure.”
I’m also a nonfiction writer. My book Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2021. Believers tells the story of trailblazers from across the globe who have developed radically new ways to live, reconnect to the earth, and repair ecological degradation in the face of species loss and climate change. Believers was a finalist for the 2022 PEN E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and it was featured in the Sunday New York Times Book Review; recommended on “Paperback Row”; and was named Best of 2021 or Recommended Reading in many publications including The Observer, Outside Magazine, Book Riot, and Bookforum.
My essays have been published by The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, N+1, and others. Recent features in Harper’s Magazine were selected by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022, and by Padma Lakshmi for The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. Some of these will be bound together in a forthcoming collection—more on that soon.
A recent twist: I’ve been making short nonfiction films and I love it! I’m also filming a longer documentary about the inimitable writer/artist/curiosity shop proprietress Martha Grover.
I currently serve as co-editor of the Kuhl House Poets Series at the University of Iowa Press. I also love helping folks shape and troubleshoot audio and video stories of all kinds. If you’re in need, please reach out.