Lisa Lee Herrick

Lisa Lee Herrick is the daughter of Hmong refugees and an award-winning Hmong-American writer, illustrator, and producer based in California. She co-founded Fresno's LitHop literary arts festival after a decade working in journalism and television. She has been featured in and/or appeared on PBS, NPR, FOX, ABS-CBN, The Fresno Bee, the Houston Chronicle and others. Today, she is the editor at large for Hyphen magazine and a regular contributor to The Rumpus, and advises nonprofit arts & public broadcasting organizations in media strategy and community outreach.

Her creative nonfiction is honored in the Best American Essays (2020-2021) and Best American Food Writing 2020. In 2019, she was selected for a Writing X Writers fellowship at the Esalen Institute in California and named a finalist for the Paper Darts Short Fiction Prize. The following year, she was a finalist for the 2020 Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Contest and longlisted for a Creative Capital Award. In 2021, Lisa was awarded a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship and paired with best-selling Hmong American writer Kao Kalia Yang as her mentor, and named a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. She is currently revising her memoir in essays, and working on a new essay collection on nature & society as well as collaborating on a topical graphic novel anthology. Her newest work will premiere in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman from Woodhall Press in September 2022.

She has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis, where her first published personal essay is permanently archived in the Department of English's Prized Writing catalogue.