Rattle Poetry

Al Maginnes has published 15 books of poetry, including Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems (Redhawk Publications, 2023) and most recently Second Line, a sonnet sequence which just released this month. He has worked as a mail clerk, a landscaper, an electrician, a carpenter's helper, a hammock weaver, surveyor, and, since 1990, as a teacher. Al has published widely, including issues 63 and 89...

Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks, and his work has appeared in two recent issues of Rattle. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Isele Magazine Poetry Prize. In 2023, he won the Hudson Review’s Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Alpine Fellowship Prize, as well as the Writivism Poetry Prize. Chiwenite served as chief editor...

José Enrique Medina is winner of the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize for Haunt Me. He earned his BA in English from Cornell University. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Best Microfiction 2019, The Los Angeles Review, The Tahoma Review, Burnside Review, and many other publications. A VONA fellow and frequent poetry slam judge, he writes with heart, heat, and just the right amount of haunt. He is...

Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator, and a finalist for the 2023 Rattle Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Someone Else's Hunger, is just out from Four Way Books. Her chapbook, Through the New Body, won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellows...

Roberta Beary (they/she) first appeared on episode 133. Roberta is long-time haibun editor at Modern Haiku and travels the world as Roving Ambassador for The Haiku Foundation. Their new book, Crazy Bitches, includes 80 haibun selected from poems written over a 20-year period, 2004 through 2024. With Lew Watts and Rich Youmans, Roberta Beary is co-author of Haibun: A Writer's Guide (2023). Find mor...

In this special episode of the Rattlecast, we announce the winners of the 2025 Rattle Poetry Prize competition, and most of the 11 poets share their prize-winning work. The annual contest offers $25,000 in awards for individual poems. Find more info on the prize here: https://rattle.com/page/poetryprize/ As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom...

Matthew Thorburn's latest book is String, a novel in poems, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2023. He’s also the author of five previous books, including The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the book-length poem Dear Almost, honored with the Lascaux Prize, and two chapbooks. ​His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Libra...

Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lanna...

Alora Young is a recent college graduate, actor, poet, and author of Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse. She was named the 2020-2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, and has performed her poetry on CNN, CBS, the TEDx stage, and more. Young talks with passion and prowess about how the history and impact of spoken word poetry, generational trauma, navigating B...

Gregory Orr has written thirteen poetry collections, a memoir, and several books of criticism, most recently A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. His poetry collections include Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved and The Caged Owl: New & Selected Poems. The recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Charlottesvi...

Sneha Madhavan-Reese is an award-winning writer and author of the poetry collections Elementary Particles and Observing the Moon. Her poems have appeared in publications around the world, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2016. Sneha's second collection, Elementary Particles, is inspired by her South Asian heritage and passion for science, and has themes of identity and belonging, lang...

Bill Hollands was born and raised in Miami, Florida, graduated from Williams College, and received his MA in English as a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellow at Cambridge University. He worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher. He lives in Seattle with his husband and their son. A multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, he has been a finalist f...

Back in June 2014, Rattle unleashed its Poets Respond series, thrusting poetry into the heart of the news with raw, immediate verses that tackle the moment. Over 800 poems later, we’ve woven a vivid tapestry of our shared history, now distilled into a stunning new anthology—our first-ever Best of Rattle Awards collection. It’s as unpredictable and electric as the times we’ve lived through. Tune in...

This conversation with Ruth Reichl originally appeared in issue #88 of Rattle and was recorded on March 25th, 2025. As a former culinary school student and foodie herself, our associate editor, Katie Dozier, joined in on the discussion. What does food have to do with poetry? Listen in to find out! Ruth Reichl is recognized as one of the most discerning voices in the food world, with accolades as a...

Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter, winner of the Moonstone Chapbook Contest. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His...

Michael Lavers is the author of two books of poems with the University of Tampa Press: After Earth (2019) and The Inextinguishable (2023). He has been awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. He has degrees from Brigham Young University, Johns Hopki...

Yoda Olinyk is an author and writing coach who assists writers with book creation. Her debut memoir, Salt and Sour, took three years to write, and its release led her to help other writers. She worked as a full-time chef until 2022, then focused on writing, publishing in literary journals, including a poem in Rattle’s current food poems tribute, and released Dear Future Lover while working on her...

John Poch is the author of seven collections of poems, including Poems (2004), a finalist for the PEN/Osterweil Prize; Two Men Fighting with a Knife (2008), winner of the Donald Justice Award; and Fix Quiet (2015), winner of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize. He is a founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine and a co-editor of Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. He is the series...

Rich Youmans is an editor, writer, and poet with a primary interest in haibun. From 2018 to 2019 he served on the editorial team of Haibun Today, and in 2020 he became editor in chief of Contemporary Haibun Online and its related print anthology, Contemporary Haibun. His books include Shadow Lines (1999), linked haibun with Margaret Chula, and Head-On: Haibun Stories (2019), both of which were rec...

Matt Mason served as the Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024 and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found in Rattle, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and...

Kat Lehmann is winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize and previously appeared on Rattlecast 8 in 2020. She is a founding editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. Her haiku have won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for Individual Poem and are featured in A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2023). Kat holds a B.A. from Hampshire College and...

For years, Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr have been exchanging poems from Mosul to Massachusetts and back, and they're now collected into a book, Where Do You Live? with translations by Wadaq Qais and Tamara Al-Attiya. They join us for a special episode at a special time (12pm ET). Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr was born in Mosul, Iraq. She is a prize-winning poet and short story writer who has particip...

Susan Cohen's most recent book is Democracy of Fire. She is the author of two chapbooks and two previous full-length collections of poems, as well as co-author of a non-fiction book. She was a newspaper reporter, contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, and faculty member of the University of California Graduate School of Journalism before studying bioethics and poetry at Stanford Univ...

Li-Young Lee is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Invention of the Darling. A collection of his new and selected mother poems, I Ask My Mother to Sing, is out this summer from Wesleyan University Press. He has received many honors for his writing including the 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Award, the American Book Award, and more. He lives in C...

Dion O'Reilly first appeared on episode 173. Her new book, Limerence, is just out from Floating Bridge Press. She is the author of two previous poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Poetr...