Lisa Olstein

Lisa Olstein is the author of six poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award; Lost Alphabet (2009), a Library Journal best book of the year; Little Stranger (2013), a Lannan Literary Selection; Late Empire (2017); Dream Apartment (2023), a finalist of the Writers League of Texas Book Award; and Distinguished Office of Echoes (2025), a collection of collage- and erasure-based poems engaging archival reference texts. Her chapbook The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to Those of Whales Is a Family Resemblance (2016) was selected by Shane McCrae for an Essay Press prize. Olstein’s nonfiction includes Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020; Hanser, 2021), a Mayor’s Book Club selection and winner of a Writers League of Texas Discovery Award; and Climate (Essay Press, 2022), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with Julie Carr.

Olstein is the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite, fronted by Jeffrey Foucault. In 2025, “Lost Alphabet for voice, five musicians, and electronics,” an adaptation of her poems by composer Januibe Tejera, premiered with Ensemble Phace. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Centrum.

Olstein earned a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, undertaking additional studies at the Aegean Center for Fine Arts and Harvard Divinity School. She co-founded and for ten years directed the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Currently, she is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs.