Lisa Lee Herrick

REPRESENTED BY JENNIFER GATES & JANE VON MEHREN, CO-AGENTS, AT AEVITAS CREATIVE MANAGEMENT.

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), and was a regular contributor to The Rumpus. Today, she is the editor at large for Hyphen magazine, serves as a board of directors member for regional NPR radio station, Valley Public Radio, and advises nonprofit arts & public broadcasting organizations in digital content strategy, media relations, and audience engagement.

Her creative nonfiction is honored in the Best American Essays (2020-2021, 2023) 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 was awarded a prestigious Elizabeth George Foundation book grant in 2024 to further develop her memoir. She spent the year traveling for research and conducting extensive interviews, and setting aside focused time for writing and recasting her nonfiction book. Lisa is also working on her first novel, a kaleidoscopic social novel based on real events, and a TBA graphic memoir/novel project. 

NEW ESSAY, "Bête Noire: A California Extinction in Five Walks," available exclusively in We Are Nature Defending Itself: An Anthology of Women on Bodies, Borders, and Place from Texas A&M University Press. Publication date: October 17, 2025. Now accepting pre-orders online: https://www.tamupress.com/book/978164843....

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. 

If you missed her conversation about narrative structure, craft, and cultural writing with Courtney Maum (Before and After the Book Deal) for The Mount - Edith Wharton House, watch the recording here: https://www.edithwharton.org/prerecorded... 

Discover more online at www.lisaleeherrick.com, and subscribe to her Substack newsletter LIBROVORE. 

Author Photo © 2021 Beowulf Sheehan