Show Notes
Amy M. Alvarez is the author of Makeshift Altar, winner of the 2025 American Book Award and CariCon Poetry Prize. Born to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents in New York, New York, her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, place, and social justice. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, the Virginia Creative Arts Center, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. She has taught at public high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts, and at West Virginia University. She currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College as an Associate Professor of the Practice.
Find more here: https://www.amymalvarez.com/
As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. Submit your poems through Submittable by midnight Sunday for a chance to be invited: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/269309/rattlecast-prompt-poems-online
For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt: Write a pantoum that plays!
Next Week’s Prompt: Write a poem that reimagines a time when you didn’t speak up but should have.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
More from Rattle Poetry
Mark Yakich joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about reading poetry, writing poetry, experimental poetics, and what makes a poem work. Yakich is the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans and director of its Center for Editing and Publishing. His books include Spiritual Exercises, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, and Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, winner of the National Poetry Series, as well as the unconventional craft book Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide. His most recent project is The Poetry Reader: An Anthology, published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
Ephraim Scott Sommers joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about poetry, chronic illness, gratitude, music, and his new collection, Diabetic Gumdrops. A poet, essayist, singer-songwriter, and associate professor of English at Winthrop University, Sommers is the author of the award-winning collections The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire and Someone You Love Is Still Alive. His poetry has appeared in Rattle and many other literary journals.
Stephen A. Allen joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast for a conversation about poetry, music, formal verse, Tourette syndrome, and his debut collection, Difficult Music. A former Rattle Poetry Prize finalist and longtime Rattle contributor, Allen was born and raised in Vermont and now lives in Michigan. His poetry has also appeared in Modern Haiku, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Northern New England Review, and elsewhere.
Molly Fisk returns to The Rattlecast for a conversation with Timothy Green about poetry, storytelling, history, and her new book, Walking Wheel. A poet, essayist, radio commentator, and former Poet Laureate of Nevada County, California, Fisk is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She first joined us on Rattlecast #61 in 2020 to discuss California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology.
Lance Larsen joins Timothy Green on The Rattlecast to celebrate Secretary of the Invisible Thing, one of the three winners of the 2026 Rattle Chapbook Prize. A former Poet Laureate of Utah, Larsen is the author of six full-length poetry collections, including Making a Kingdom of It, What the Body Knows, and Genius Loci. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and his honors include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.