Poet Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto, and currently lives in France. She was based for many years in Vancouver, where she ran an independent bookstore and was a member of the Kootenay School of Writing, a writer-run center for writing, publishing, and scholarship. She was also involved in Artspeak Gallery, an alternative gallery that connects the visual arts and writing.
Robertson is known for working in book-length projects. Her latest work is 3 Summers (2017) published by Coach House Books. Lisa’s subject matter includes political themes, such as gender and nation, as well as the problems of form and genre; she has written works that explore literary forms such as the pastoral, epic, and weather forecast.
Previous publications include Cinema of the Present (2014); Magenta Soul Whip (2009); R’s Boat (2010); The Men (2006); Debbie: An Epic (1997), nominated for a Governor General’s Award; and The Weather (2001), which Robertson wrote during her Judith E. Wilson fellowship at Cambridge University.
Her architectural essays are collected in Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (revised ed. 2010), and Nilling (2012) is a work of prose essays.
Robertson was the subject of a special issue of Chicago Review and was the Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California-Berkeley in 2006. In 2005 she was awarded the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English. She has taught at the University of California-San Diego, Dartington College of Art, California College of Art, University of Cambridge, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and École des Beaux Arts, Bordeaux.