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 the quarterly Wisconsin People & Ideas, the membership magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Under her leadership the magazine won its first state awards and was nominated for an Utne Reader Independent Press Award for best regional magazine. She 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.