Lisa Fishman grew up in Pontiac, Michigan. She earned a BA at Michigan State University, where she studied with Diane Wakoski; an MFA at Western Michigan University, where she studied with William Olsen; and a PhD in literature at the University of Utah, with a dissertation on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetics.
 
Influenced by the British Romantic poets and the pastoral tradition, Fishman composes haunting poems that explore the movement of mind and memory. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Dear, Read (2002), The Happiness Experiment (2007), and Current (2010). A Publishers Weekly review of The Happiness Experiment noted, “Nothing in Fishman’s laconic earlier books would have predicted the dreamy, impressive exuberance in this, her third: the poet depicts her rural surroundings, their precedents in classical pastoral, and her own, generously drift-prone imagination in these lyrical sequences, exploring attachments geographic, georgic, erotic and maternal.”
 
Fishman and her husband, along with poet Richard Meier, run a 12-acre “Poetry Farm” in southern Wisconsin, offering summer internships for poets that exchange accommodations for farm labor. Fishman has taught at Beloit College and Columbia College Chicago.