Meet Me
Hi, I'm Lisa Lerner.
Talking story is my happy place and I love to help people tell theirs.
I am by nature a self-starter. I learn by doing. After graduating from Cornell University with a B.S. in Communication Arts, I worked in a multi-generational community theater and learned improv. One day, I moved to San Francisco, turned an old, pre-quake horse garage into an improv studio, and The Garage of Destiny was born. I designed a publicity campaign for my classes and soon I was making enough money to pay the rent.
Five years later, while living in the East Village of Manhattan, I bought a baritone ukulele, and taught myself how to write songs so I could become a performance artist named Cowboy Girl. For five years, I played all over the downtown NYC theater scene and won the Franklin Furnace Award for Performance Art.
After that, I taught myself how to write a novel, Just Like Beauty, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Six years later, it was optioned for a movie, and it is currently in pre-production with Lars Von Trier's Zentropa Production Company and Patriot Pictures scheduled to shoot in 2023.
Shortly after my book was published, I became a single mother by choice. Just like that, I was on the fast track to learning the art of juggling motherhood with freelancing. Seven years of high-speed waitressing at the Blue Note jazz club in New York City was good prep for that!
My writing projects have taken me on a dazzling journey filled with hard research and wild imagination: I've written about the science of roller coasters, single mothers in shelters, and the many ways architects are inspired by the natural world. I've invented fictional rabbits that (spoiler) win cooking contests, and designed instruction on how to teach Old English literature to high school students who speak zero English. I've created ads, press releases, newsletters, blogs, fundraising materials, training scripts, interactive museum exhibits, workbooks, digital stories, and over three hundred billion emails.
Okay, that's me. Thanks for reading. Got a story? Let me help you tell it!