Lisa Avelleyra
Lisa is a lifelong lover of words and peruser of dictionaries. Once she discovered reading, she devoured anything she could get her hands on from the TV Guide to the Encyclopedia. On the shelves in her older sisters' bedroom, she discovered Nancy Drew, side by side with the teen adventures of Marcy Rhodes by Rosamund du Jardin. On those same shelves, she found heavier fare - teen pregnancy in "My Darling, My Hamburger" and teen drug addiction in the anonymous memoir "Go Ask Alice." Once she got her library card, she filled in the Nancy Drew gaps and moved on to a grown-up series, "The Bastard," "The Rebels," etc. by John Jakes. Cloaked in historical fiction, the series introduced Lisa to descriptive sex, provocative reading for a Catholic girl in a household where "that" subject was never mentioned. In seventh grade, it was onto bestsellers, "Jaws" tucked into textbooks, furtively read during class; "Rosemary's Baby" confiscated by sharp-eyed principal Sister Catherina. Her natural affinity for the English language began to manifest itself in the classroom, Lisa the one to beat in spelling races at the chalkboard. She relished diagramming sentences in front of her classmates. A woeful lack of self-awareness led to an initial major in forestry until a creative writing class steering her toward journalism. Lisa earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and worked in newspapers for five years, column-writing being her favorite part of the job. After working in a bookstore for eight years, gravitated toward adminstrative support jobs where she has remained. Reading and writing waned during the drinking years until Lisa got sober and wrote about it. She has rekindled her love affair with words and strengthens the bond every day.
