Life and work

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Robertson moved to British Columbia in 1979, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing, which is a writer-run collective, and Artspeak Gallery. Her first book was a chapbook, The Apothecary, published by Tsunami Editions in 1991. Since then she has published seven books of poetry and two books of essays.

Robertson studied at Simon Fraser University (1984-1988), then left the university to become an independent bookseller (1988-1994). Since 1995 she has been a freelance writer and teacher. Her many essays on the contemporary visual arts, published in gallery and museum catalogues since the mid-1990s, are collected in her 2003 book Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture.

In 2006, Robertson was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley. From 2007 to 2010 she taught at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In Fall 2010 she was writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Robertson is a writing tutor in the Master of Fine Arts program at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. In Spring 2014 she was the Bain Swigget lecturer in Poetry at Princeton University.

Selected bibliography

• The Apothecary (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami, 1991; reissued 2001)
  • reissued (Toronto: Bookthug, 2007)
• The Barscheit Horse with Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart (Hamilton, Ontario: Berkeley Horse, 1993)
• XEclogue II-V (Vancouver: Sprang Texts, 1993)
• XEclogue (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami Editions 1993, reissued by New Star Books, 1999)
• The Glove: An Essay on Interpretation (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993)
• The Badge (Hamilton, Ontario: The Berkeley Horse/Mindware, 1994)
• Earth Monies (Mission, BC: DARD, 1995)
• The Descent (Buffalo, NY: Meow, 1996)
• Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver, BC: New Star, 1997; UK: Reality Street, 1997)
• Soft Architecture: A Manifesto (Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1999)
• The Weather (Vancouver, BC: New Star, 2001; UK: Reality Street, 2001)
• A Hotel (Vancouver: Vancouver Film School, 2003)
• Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria, OR: Clear Cut Press, 2003)
• Face/ (New York: A Rest Press, 2003)
• Rousseau’s Boat (Vancouver, BC: Nomados, 2004)
• First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant. Belladonna 75. (Brooklyn: Belladonna Books, 2005)
• The Men: A Lyric Book (Toronto: BookThug, 2006)
• Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2009)
• R's Boat (University of California Press, 2010)
• Nilling: Prose (Toronto: BookThug, 2012)
• Cinema Of the Present (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2014)

Selected essays

• "Coasting" with Jeff Derksen, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang. Telling it Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace. (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2002)
• "The Weather: A Report on Sincerity," from DC Poetry Anthology 2001.
• "How Pastoral: A Manifesto." A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994)
• "My Eighteeneth Century." Assembling Alternatives. Ed. Romana Huk. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003)
• "On Palinode." Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)

Selected interviews and conversations

• "Correspondence" with Steve McCaffery. Philly Talks #17. (Philadelphia: Kelly Writers House, 2000)
• "Lifted" with Kai Fierle-Hedrick. Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)
• Interview with Julie Carr (The Volta, 2013).
• Brecken Hancock An Interview with Lisa Robertson (CWILA, 2012)
• Andy Fitch with Lisa Robertson (The Conversant, 2013)
• Out-Takes from Ted Byrne's Interview with Lisa Robertson (Capilano Review, 2011)

[ Source: Wikipedia ]