After decades of moving—from a one-bedroom Boston condo to sweet older homes in Connecticut, Ohio, and North Carolina—my husband and I have settled (I'm fairly sure) for our third acts in Barrington, Rhode Island. There you’ll find me running and biking on beautiful bike paths, playing with watercolors, and still scrolling through Zillow listings—but only for friends and family.

 

My work over forty-plus years has included editing university and city magazines and directing communications for a number of nonprofit organizations and research institutes.​ Currently I am a contributing writer for Grow Smart Rhode Island and wrapping up the second edition of a guide to biking, walking, or running the East Coast Greenway in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

 

My own writing has tended to focus on place and personal change. In 2005 I pitched Ohio University Press on an anthology, Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio. Twenty award-winning writers including Anthony Doerr, Mary Oliver, Susan Orlean, and PJ O'Rourke contributed essays and poetry about their Buckeye State childhoods. Good Roots won the 2008 Ohioana Legacy Citation award.​

 

In 2024 I published a travel memoir, Crossing Bridges: What Biking Up the East Coast Taught Me About Life After 60, in which I share lasting lessons from a two-month, three-thousand-mile bike ride from Key West to Canada that I took at fifty-eight.​​

​

—Lisa A. Watts