Lisa Borders is the author of three novels. Last Night at the Disco, a dark comedy published in 2025, is a finalist for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and won a Silver Medal in Humor in the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her previous novels are The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, a 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards honoree. Lisa lives west of Boston with her partner and two rescue cats.
After writing and publishing “serious” fiction for 25 years, Borders made the pivot to humor in 2017, when McSweeney’s published her first short humor piece, Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause. She has published 18 more pieces in McSweeney’s since then, and had the site’s fifth most read piece of 2025. Borders’ short humor has also appeared in Points in Case, Slackjaw and The Belladonna, and she had a humorous essay published in Oldster earlier this year.
Borders wrote much of her comedic novel Last Night at the Disco at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she feels embracing comedy shifted her relationship to her own writing.
“After years of writing I had come to feel – especially with my second novel, which was largely about grief – that writing fiction was an emotionally wrenching experience, but something I had to endure for the end product,” she said. “When I shifted to writing satire and short humor, I rediscovered a joy I’d had when I was a much younger writer. Publishing short humor then gave me the confidence to write a comedic novel, which ended up being a godsend during the pandemic. I have a day job in a hospital laboratory, and work during that period was bleak. But I’d come home and lose myself in this dark comedy set in the 1970s. It was just the escape I needed.”
After a tour of independent bookstores with her novel last fall, Borders has participated in a variety of book festivals and humor showcases this year, including Slackjaw Live in New York City. Her next appearance will be Oct. 3 at the New Hampshire Book Festival in Concord, New Hampshire.