Lisa Jones

First, let me point out who I am not: I'm not the Lisa Jones who wrote Bulletproof Diva (whose author was hailed by the Boston Globe back in 1997 for writing "so vibrant and dynamic, her words create a kind of fierce music... a fabulous book.") Damn! I wish I DID write that book. Its publisher called it chock full of "fierce black girl humor." Lisa lives in New York City and even worked with Spike Lee. Me, I'm of Swedish/Irish stock and am pretty much white as snow. I was raised mostly in Denver, went to college up the road in Boulder, worked briefly on used car lots, started practicing Buddhist meditation, and wrote a book. But so did ANOTHER Lisa Jones, whose book, Up: A novel (about car sales and love) won her a 2003 "Best Novel About a Car Saleswoman" citation from Westword magazine, Denver's weekly newspaper. I got an e-mail from that Lisa Jones a few years back when I wrote a column about my boyfriend that appeared in the Denver Post. The by-line had caused some confusion among her friends, since she was, in her own words, "a big ole queer." I'm the other Lisa Jones, the one who wrote BROKEN: A Love Story, which is here on this page. It is about an extraordinary man named Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who lives on Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation, gentling horses and healing people of all sorts of maladies. He happens to be quadriplegic. The book is about him, and how he helped me overcome pain I wasn't fully aware that I had. He and his family are the heroes of my book. As for the rest of my writing life, I have been a journalist for 25 years, writing mostly about the environment and food. I've been published in High Country News, the New York Times magazine, Smithsonian, and Tin House. I live in Colorado with my husband and cat.