Lisa Fishman is a Canadian and United Statesian poet and fiction writer who grew up in the Detroit area and Northern Michigan with family roots in Montreal. Much of her childhood was spent in the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. For the past ten years, she's been dividing her time between Wisconsin and Canada, both Northern Ontario and Nova Scotia, where most of her writing now emerges. She will soon be living at least part-year on Unama'ki-Cape Breton Island and hopes for that to be year-round.

The author of eight collections of poetry, most on Wave Books and Ahasahta Press, Fishman publishes her fiction in Canada, including her debut novelWrite Back Now!, forthcoming on 1366, an imprint for experimental fiction on Guernica Editions. Her book of stories, World Naked Bike Ride, was published by Gaspereau Press (Nova Scotia) in 2022 and shortlisted in Canada for the 2023 Relit Award for Short Fiction. 

Her newest poetry book, One Big Time, was written in a kayak in Northern Ontario (Wave Books, 2025).

Her newest essay, "A Careening Wharf, For a Time", centres on the Lighthouse Trail in Louisbourg, NS, and was published in 2025 by the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1696286/this-be-the-place-a-careening-wharf

Fishman's work was selected for the 2014 Best American Experimental Writing, ed. Cole Swenson (Omnidawn) and has been anthologized in The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press), Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon UP, 2000) and elsewhere. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Granta, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, 6x6, Volt, The Rupture, The Fairy Tale Review, 1913, and other journals. 

Fishman has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. Her second book, Dear, Read, was a finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and selected for publication by Brenda Hillman. In the autumn of 2011, she held a makeshift residency in Fort Atkinson and Blackhawk Island, working in Lorine Niedecker's cabin with the support of Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Fishman was a featured author in the Afterwords Literary Festival in Halifax (2023) and the Virginia Festival of the Book (2024). She was awarded a Summer Writers Residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Alberta) in 2023. 

Other readings, guest lectures, panels, and service Fishman has done in Canada include lecturing on Frederico Garcia Lorca's lyric poetry in translation at Cape Breton University, helping to judge the Hart House Poetry Contest at University of Toronto, serving as first-round judge for the The Writers Union of Canada Short Prose Competition, participating as a panelist in Simon Fraser University's Adult Education "Poetry and Process" panel, reading in the National Public Reading Series (TWUC) and at On Paper Books (Sydney, NS), The Printed Word Bookstore (Dundas, ON), and the 5-7 Reading Series at Coach House Books. She has written reviews of Canadian poetry in Poetry Salzburg Review and has been teaching contemporary and experimental Canadian poetry at Columbia College throughout her academic career.  

All books:

Write Back Now!  (1366, Guernica Editions, forthcoming 2026)

World Naked Bike Ride (Gaspereau Press, 2022)

One Big Time (Wave Books, 2025)

Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave, 2020)

24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015)

F L O W E R  C A R T (Ahsahta Press, 2011)

Current (Parlor Press, 2011)

The Happiness Experiment (Ahsahta, 2007)

Dear, Read (Ahsahta, 2002)

The Deep Heart's Core Is a Suitcase (New Issues Press, 1996)

Chapbooks:

Deer 1 (Oxeye Press, 2015)

at the same time as scattering (Albion Books, 2010)

Lining (Boxwood Editions, 2009)

KabbaLoom (Wyrd Press, 2008)

"The Holy Spirit does not deal in synonimes": a Transcription of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Marginalia in Her Greek and Hebrew Bibles (Parcel Press, 2008). 

Pamphlet:

"Note on Niedecker’s Takuboku" (The Brother in Elysium, 2015) 

Selected reviews and interviews are linked below. [UNDER CONSTRUCTION, 9/5/25]