ABOUT JOAN

Joan Fischer got her grounding in journalism as a stringer for the Associated Press in Germany, where her work earned her bylines in The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. One of her earliest freelance jobs was serving as a writer and translator for a Lufthansa inflight magazine about “people, places, and problems,” according to its tagline.

People, places, and problems—those are the things that still draw Joan’s interest today, whether it’s a profile of artist David Lenz, winner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s first portrait competition; a place such as Wisconsin’s Deer Park Buddhist Center, one of the nation’s leading Tibetan Buddhist communities; or a problem such as our country’s urgent need for more organ donors.

Joan’s writing shows the mark of her many years as a magazine editor with Madison Magazine and Wisconsin People & Ideas. She currently serves as editor of Grow, Wisconsin’s magazine for the life sciences, published by the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Joan holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.