Lisa Gale Garrigues, also published as Lisa Garrigues, is a California writer, journalist, poet, and photographer who covered South America and is a contributing editor for YES! Magazine. [1] In 2004 she won a Project Censored award in journalism for her coverage of the people's response to the economic crisis in Argentina, and has also published fiction, essays, and poetry in both English and Spanish.[2]
As a correspondent for the magazine Indian Country Today[3], in 2008 she completed and reported on Longest Walk 2, which went from Alcatraz Island, California, to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to environmental problems and Native American sacred sites.[4]
Lisa Gale Garrigues (born 1954 in Los Angeles, California) attended public school in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Geneva (Switzerland), and Bellingham, Washington. In the 1970's, she lived in San Francisco, England, France, and Spain, where she witnessed the decline of the dictator Francisco Franco and co-translated, with Alberto Esquival, the first Spanish translation of the folksinger Woody Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory.
She published her first poems and essays in the 1980's in periodicals which included Conditions, Pudding Magazine, and Writer's Digest. In 1984, she earned a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.
In San Francisco and Los Angeles, she worked in education, marketing, film and as a legal investigator for criminal and civil rights cases. She continued to publish poetry and fiction in diverse literary journals, including Nimrod International, Southwestern American Literature, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Rain Crow, So to Speak, Anthology, God's Friends, Literal Latte,and other periodicals.
In 2001, she moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, which was then in the throes of an economic meltdown. For two years, she worked as an English teacher and freelance correspondent for Pacific News Service and Yes! Magazine, participating in the Argentinian neighborhood assemblies that were then springing up around the city. In Buenos Aires, she edited the website Argentina Now[5], was a regular contributor to the Argentinian website elatico.com[6], and was associate producer of the documentary Hope in Hard Times.
She returned to Latin America in 2005, where she traveled throughout Peru and Bolivia for two years, working as a freelance writer/photographer for Indian Country Today, Yes Magazine and Tikkun, reporting on the new Bolivian government of Evo Morales, the effects of natural gas exploitation in the Camisea region of Peru, liberation theology[7], and other topics.[8]
In 2008, she joined the Longest Walk 2, a five month walk across the United States to draw attention to the environment and Native American sacred sites, and reported on the walk and other Native issues for Indian Country Today.
She currently lives in Oakland,California.