Lisa Wells

Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer from Portland, Oregon. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Fix (2018), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A starred review at Publisher’s Weekly described the collection as “a brilliant, taut, terrifying debut that renders the parts of the inner and outer world for which there is no real cure.” Her poems and essays can be found in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Believer, n+1, the Iowa Review and elsewhere.

A first generation college graduate, Wells dropped out of high school and worked in food service for 15 years before earning a BFA from Goddard College, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Wells lives with the poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson in Seattle, where they edit a journal, The Volta, and a small press called Letter Machine Editions.