Lisa Robertson was born on 22 July 1961 in Newmarket, Ontario. In 1979, she moved to Vancouver, where she attended Simon Fraser University and became involved in the Kootenay School of Writing, an artist-run collective that works to advance avant-garde writing practices. Robertson is the author of several books of poetry, including The Apothecary (1991), XEclogue (1993), Debbie: An Epic (1997), The Weather (2001), Rousseaus Boat (2004), and The Men: A Lyric Book (2006), and has contributed to various anthologies. She has also written many chapbooks; essays and reviews on poetry, contemporary art, and architecture; and regular columns for various magazines and journals (among them, Mix Magazine and the interior design magazine, Nest). She edited the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology, and has worked in an editorial capacity on several journals, including Raddle Moon, Front, and Barscheit. Robertson has received wide recognition for her work: She was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998 for Debbie: An Epic; she won the Relit Award for Poetry in 2002 for The Weather; and in 2006, she received the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Rousseaus Boat. In 1999, Robertson was granted the Judith E Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry by the University of Cambridge. She was a visiting poet and lecturer at the University of California at San Diego in 2003, and in 2006/7, she served as the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California at Berkeley. Currently (2008) she is a visiting artist and lecturer at the California College of the Arts. She has taught at Capilano College, the American University of Paris, Dartington College for the Arts, and at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She has also served on the advisory boards of Artspeak Gallery and Emily Carr Institute Press, and as a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Between 2003 and 2007, Robertson lived in France. She now lives in Oakland, CA.