Lisa Borders is the author of two novels, The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing’s Fred Bonnie Award in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards and was a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year and the Independent Publisher (IPPY) awards. Borders’s short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review, and other journals, and her essay, "Enchanted Night," was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center.