Zara Lisbon Books in Order

Zara Lisbon was born in New York's West Village and grew up in Venice, California. She writes fiction and poetry, and her work lives in that uneasy space where glamour, longing, and bad decisions keep bumping into each other.

She wanted to write early.

At about eight, she was writing little plays because she thought it might help her meet Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Then Nancy Drew took over, and the goal shifted from plays to novels, especially mysteries. By sixteen, she was taking the idea of becoming a writer seriously, and she has said one of the gifts her parents gave her was simple: they never told her not to try.

Venice mattered too. Lisbon has described growing up there as an education in art by osmosis, a place full of creative people that made making things feel normal. She has also said that Venice was her first real home, which helps explain why versions of it keep showing up in her work, complete with canals, beach light, and the strange overlap of beauty and decay.

She studied English at Loyola Marymount University and later earned an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During grad school she wrote an earlier novel called Crystalmethylacrilate, which she later described as a kind of precursor to her published fiction because it was already wrestling with fame and Los Angeles. She has also spoken about how studying syntax, sentence length, and rhythm helped her think about emotion on the page. A year after graduate school, she started Fake Plastic Girl, and she spent close to two years getting it finished.

Fake Plastic Girl became her debut novel, a sharp YA thriller about lonely Venice Beach teen Justine Childs, ex-child-star Eva Kate Kelly, and the dangerous lure of celebrity. Its sequel, Fake Plastic World, keeps Justine under suspicion and pushes further into murder, courtroom pressure, and the ugly intimacy of public attention. Readers who click with Lisbon usually like the speed of her plots, her sharp social eye, and the way she writes teenage ambition without cleaning up the messiest parts.

She likes crime stories, but she is just as interested in performance.

That mix carries into the rest of her bibliography. She co-wrote Life Uploaded with Sierra Furtado, and her first poetry collection, Baby's First Apocalypse, turns inward without losing her pop culture charge. The poems move through desire, bruises, family echoes, homes that never quite hold still, and the daily weirdness of trying to build a self. Across forms, Lisbon keeps returning to girlhood, celebrity, loneliness, longing, and the blurry line between wanting attention and wanting love.

Before and alongside her books, she published articles for HelloGiggles, The Observer, and HitFix, and placed short fiction and poems in magazines including FORTH Magazine, Able Muse, Attic Salt, La Miscellany, and Cheap Pop. More recent contributor bios describe her as a writer of fiction, TV, and poetry. She has also lived in Los Angeles, close to the beaches, canyons, and celebrity spillover that feed so much of her fiction.

There is personality in the small details she shares too: a love of Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift, abstract impressionism, artificial winter wonderlands, and even air conditioning. That sounds funny until you read the work. Lisbon's books and poems often have that same mix of dreaminess, wit, and clear-eyed awareness that fantasy can be beautiful, and still not save you.