COUTURIER TO JUDGE BLANCHAN/DOUBLEDAY COMPETITION (CONT.): Growing up in Boston, Lisa Couturier loved the outdoors. Her parents and siblings teased her about her affinity for animals, especially sick or injured ones. “Early on I knew about the intense relationships that develop between people and animals that need something,” she said. Another childhood influence was odd, consider that she’s spent most of her career as a writer or editor. “I’m a childhood survivor of not being read to,” she said. Her home lacked books so she had to depend on the school and the local library to meet her reading needs. But she did have a Irish-Catholic grandfather who loved to tell stories. “We all were storytellers,” she remembered. After college, Couturier worked as a New York City-based environmental writer and as a magazine editor. Writing assignments took her all over South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Her work has been featured in the American Nature Writing series, National Geographic’s Heart of a Nation: Writers and Photographers Inspired by the American Landscape, and in the New York Zoological Society’s Wildlife Conservation magazine. She’s written articles for E: The Environmental Magazine; Orion magazine; Isotope: A Magazine of Literary Science and Nature Writing; and Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature. For full bio, go to her web site.
