Lisa G. Dill grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and is a lifelong animal lover, horseback rider, and sufferer of wanderlust. She has hiked, ridden, swum, paddled, and backpacked in fifteen countries and forty-six states, and shared her life with ponies, horses, cats, ferrets, fish, birds, and dogs. The daughter of two writers, she spent her teens and twenties trying very hard not to be a writer and getting published anyway. In her thirties, she gave herself up to nature, earned a Master's in English Literature, and became a full-time writer and teacher.
In 2013, Lisa went almost 700 miles down the Missouri River with four of her mother's cousins on a 41-year-old pontoon boat. The book that emerged from that trip, Around the Bend (Bison Books, 2026), earned her a spot at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference and the State of Delaware Creative Nonfiction Fellowship for Established Writers. She teaches creative, environmental, and professional writing at the University of Delaware and creative environmental nonfiction for the Iowa Board of Regents at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. The rest of the time, she is writing a novel, riding horses, and serving as the personal assistant to a German Shepherd/Great Pyrenees dog named D'Artagnan.
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Around the bend
The Missouri River is one of the most dangerous rivers in the United States—and one of the most economically important. Even as prolonged drought in the Midwest has imperiled urban drinking water and agricultural water supplies, parched regions in the basin far from the river have proposed piping water from the Missouri to alleviate their own water shortages.
In an attempt to better understand the river and its place in the American imagination, Lisa G. Dill set out with four of her mother’s cousins on a forty-year-old pontoon boat on a modern voyage of discovery. The hope was to sail nearly 750 river miles from Sioux City, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, a goal whose success was by no means assured, given the rickety state of the family vessel. From departure—a day late, because the motor wouldn’t start—until she got off the boat, Dill bears witness to the river, its flora and fauna, the efforts to control it, and its history, along with the misadventures of a crew of “relative strangers” and the boat’s tenuous viability on one of the world’s most powerful rivers.
In Around the Bend Dill teases out the cultural and environmental history of the Missouri and urges readers to change the way they think about America’s rivers and the landscapes through which they flow.