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, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the Levis Poetry Prize (Four Way Books, 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 was Recommended Reading in many publications including The Observer, Outside Magazine, Book Riot, Bookforum, and the New York Times Book Review.
My essays have been published by Granta, The Believer, N+1, The New York Times and others, and 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.
I also produce documentary film and audio and love helping to shape nonfiction stories in all mediums. If you’re in need, please reach out.