Lisa Samuels grew up in the United States, Sweden, and the Middle East. She has a PhD from the University of Virginia, where she wrote her dissertation on Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens, and academic poetry criticism. She publishes on Riding and other modernist and contemporary poets as well as on subjects such as linguistic beauty, poetic analysis, and intellectual property. She taught in Utah, Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Michigan before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000 to teach poetry writing and literature. In 2006, she took up a position as Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of seven collections of poetry.