Rattle Poetry

Francesca Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. She has worked as a massage therapist, a cleaning lady, a daycare worker, a nanny, a barista, and a server in the kitchen of a retirement home. Bell’s writing appears in many magazines including ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books,...

Originally from the west of Ireland, Anne Casey is a poet and writer living in Sydney, Australia. Over a 30-year career, she has worked as a business journalist, writer, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. She is author of five books of poetry, including one co-authored with US poet, Heather Bourbeau. She has served as Vice President of Voices of Women Incorporated, a...

Frank Dullaghan is an Irish writer living in the UK after 15 years in the Middle and Far East. He holds an MA with Distinction in Writing from the University of South Wales. He has been widely published in literary journals and has five collections published by Cinnamon Press, most recently In the Coming of Winter. Secrets of the Body, a pamphlet of poems about the mythical Pope Joan, was publishe...

Michael Favala Goldman is a Danish literary translator, educator and jazz clarinetist. Goldman’s books of original poetry include Who has time for this? (2020), Slow Phoenix (2021), Small Sovereign (2021), If you were here you would feel at home (2022), and This May Sound Familiar (2022). Among his seventeen translated books are Dependency (Penguin Classics) by Tove Ditlevsen, The Water Farm Trilo...

Published by Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of Anne Frank's diary, New Voices is a ground-breaking multigenre book. The editors selected 58 distinct images from noted collections consisting of vintage photography, propaganda posters, newsreel stills and the like, matching each to a poet, short story or flash fiction writer, plus features by essayists...

Tresha Faye Haefner has studied poetry outside of academia with poets including Kim Addonizio, Sally Ashton, and Ellen Bass. Her own work has been published in several journals, including BloodLotus, The Cincinnati Review Fourth River, Hunger Mountain, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She is founder of The Poetry Salon and is the recipient of the 2011 Robert and Adele Sc...

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnipro, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She earned a Ph. D in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Interge...

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s poem, “when I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:” was chosen by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in The Best American Poetry of 2016. Her poems and flash fiction have been published in over 200 literary magazines and journals, including: RATTLE, Verse Daily, VOX POPULI, Slipstream, Spillway, Askew, Plume, and elsewhere. Find Alexis’s photographs on the...

Dick Westheimer and his wife and writing companion, Debbie, have lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. A regular at the Rattlecast open mic, his poems have appeared several times in Rattle's Poets Respond series, and he was a finalist for the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Paterson Review, Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyrosc...

John W. Evans is winner of the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize for The Fight Journal. He's also the author of Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014). His books have won prizes including the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the River...

Rachel Custer's new book, Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books) is a "hard-hitting and harrowing and almost hypnotically beautiful" look at Middle America. Custer is also the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2019 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a 2015 mentorship from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poet...

Jennifer Reeser is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Strong Feather (Able Muse Press, 2022), and Indigenous (Able Muse Press, 2019), which was awarded Best Poetry Book of 2019 by Englewood Review of Books. Reeser's poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, the Hud...

James Davis May is the author of Unusually Grand Ideas, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in February 2023. His previous collection. Unquiet Things, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2016 and named runner-up for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in Five Points, Guernica, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The New Republ...

Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Abby E. Murray has moved around the country and taught writing in Colorado, Georgia, Alaska, New York, and Washington, where she served as the 2019-2021 Poet Laureate for the city of Tacoma. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the 2019 Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Previous chapbooks include How to Be Ma...

Sarah A. Etlinger holds a BA in English from Skidmore College, an MA in English from Syracuse University, and a Ph. D. in Rhetoric and Composition (English) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Scholarly interests include new media studies, first-year composition, feminist literature, the Beatles, and popular culture. Currently, she is Associate professor of Composition and Literature at Ro...

The originally schedule guest, Kwame Dawes, couldn't make it, so this week's episode of the Rattlecast featured an extended open lines. But first, Michael Mark and Thomas Mixon joined to share recent Poets Respond poems. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week’s Prompt: Write a linked haiku sequence in which each haiku includes a line from the previo...

Michael Dylan Welch has written haiku since 1976. He is a past or current officer, director, or board member of the Haiku Society of America, the Haiku Poets of Northern California, Haiku Northwest, Haiku North America (cofounder, 1991), the American Haiku Archives (cofounder, 1996), and the Tanka Society of America (founder, 2000; president 2000-2004). Michael is poet laureate for the city of Red...

Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist who walks the desert with her son J.J. in search of owl pellets and rattlesnake skins. Her poetry collections include The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross hav...

A.E. Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, The Missour...

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: All Possible Histories, released in December 2022 with Riot in Your Throat; Letdown, released in March 2020, selected for the Marie Alexander Series, and published by White Pine Press, and Boy With a Halo at the Farmer's Market, which won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize and was published in 2015. Her chapbook, Hele...

Poet, community organizer, and instructor Angela Voras-Hills grew up in Wisconsin. She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of the poetry collection Louder Birds (2020), selected by Traci Brimhall for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Voras-Hills has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and Key West Literary Seminar as well as a fellowship fro...

Emily Ruth Hazel is a cross-pollinating poet, author, and artist who is passionate about diversifying the audience for poetry and the contexts in which we find it. Founder and creative director of Wild Honey Words, a poetry-meets-art boutique that offers expressive apparel, accessories, décor, and journals featuring her words and designs, Emily brings everyday life into poetry and brings poetry in...

John Brehm was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of three full-length books of poetry, Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach, all from the University of Wisconsin Press, and a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press. His collection of essays, The Dharma of Poetry, was recently release...

Dion O’Reilly’s debut book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her second collection, Sadness of the Apex Predator, was chosen for the 2024 Portage Poetry Series from University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press. Her poems and essays appear in The Sun, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ghost Dogs is the winner of the Ind...

Elaine Sexton’s latest collection of poems is Drive (Grid Books, 2022). Her three previous books of poetry are: Sleuth (New Issues, 2003), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), and Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). An avid book maker and micro-publisher, she is the author of several chapbooks, and has curated site-specific events with accompanying limited-edition chapbooks, and periodicals, among...