Lisa Reardon was born Lisa Ann Hicks on January 22, 1962. She grew up in southeastern Michigan and graduated in 1980 from Milan High School in Milan, Michigan. She spent most of the next decade working as a salad bar girl, a pharmacist’s cashier, a clerk in a record store, an audio cassette transcriber, a factory worker making automobile springs, a truck stop cashier, a farmers' market cashier, an assistant editor, a motel night clerk, a typesetter, a librarian’s assistant, an insurance secretary, and a maker of caramel apples.
Lisa finally earned her Bachelors Degree in English and Theater from the University of Michigan in 1989. She then moved on to the Yale School of Drama and spent three years in New Haven, Connecticut earning a Masters Degree in Playwriting. She wrote under the name of Lisa Wing from 1986 until 1991. While in graduate school, her play, “Blush at Nothing,” was chosen as the inaugural production of the Purple Rose Theater in Chelsea, Michigan.
In 1992 Lisa changed her legal name to Reardon and moved to New York City where she wrote plays for several years. After receiving numerous small productions she retired from the theater in 1984, saying diplomatically, “I did not enjoy the collaborative process.”
Not knowing any better, she stumbled into novel writing. “Billy Dead” was sold in October of 1997, enabling her to quit her job as a word processor at a banking firm in Manhattan. After the publication of her second novel, “Blameless,” in the spring of 2000, Ms. Reardon taught novel writing and short fiction at New York’s Gotham Writers’ Workshop. During this time, she worked for three years with the Adolescent Psychiatric Division of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, where she ran a creative writing workshop for teens aged twelve to seventeen.
“Billy Dead” has been published in France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany where Lisa was invited to promote the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall of 2000. This was a great experience and one that she hopes to repeat as soon as possible. “Blameless” has been translated into German and Hebrew, made into an audiocassette, and released in a large print edition.
Lisa's third novel, "The Mercy Killers," is set in Ypsilanti (IP-si-LANT-i), Michigan in 1969. The paperback edition was released in October. Japanese translation of "The Mercy Killers" in progress.
For three years Lisa lived in Chicago where she continued to teach online classes for Gotham Writers' Workshop and ran creative writing workshops at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
Lisa now lives in the wilds of Michigan with her cat, Godfrey...her boon companion for 17 years. When not working on her fourth novel, she works at Boysville (a medium-security treatment facility for adjudicated youth) where she is part prison guard/part mom. She has instituted a writing group there for the youth...because she just can't seem to help herself.
