LISA CAHN - Founder, Producer, Director

As a child, I thought about stories all the time. But not just stories I’d read. Everywhere I went I crafted a tale about whatever I was doing. If I went to my friend Julie’s house on the other side of the cul-de-sac, I wasn’t just running across the circle to hang out at her house. I was swimming through shark-infested waters to get to some cave where I would rescue her from her kidnappers.

I certainly had a vivid imagination, but as an empathic child, I think I also needed to make sense of my place in the world around me in a safe way, and putting myself inside the confines of a story somehow met that need. So I would constantly imagine that I was a character in some epic tale whose plot pivoted wildly, had a constantly changing cast of characters, and was peppered with quirky dialogue. (Even as an adult, on the subway, strangers' conversations around me unwittingly became snippets of dialogue in the stories unfurling in my head.) 

In my earlier career as a journalist, I realized that everyone actually is a character in their own worthy story. Ardently interested in people’s lives, I became a profile-writer, scouring the five boroughs of NYC looking for humans with quirky stories to tell. As I interviewed strangers with my clunky tape recorder, I began to understand that just about any life can be fascinating, moving, and universal--if it becomes a story well told.

It is this love of humans sharing stories that I bring to my work as an audiobook producer. 

I began my journey in the audiobook industry as an executive producer at Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing. Years later I joined Hachette Audio, where for nearly a decade I produced the audio editions of the company’s best-selling titles, collaborating with VIP authors. A thousand audiobooks and numerous industry awards later, I now run Prose Garden Productions, a boutique audiobook production house, out of my carriage house recording studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, about 70 miles north of NYC. 

Outside the studio, I can often be found--headphones free--at rare book auctions, fly-fishing in the tributaries of the Hudson River, or hiking in the Catskills with my Irish doodle, Remy.

Formal Education: AB, Religious Studies and Comparative Literature, Occidental College. MS, Journalism, Columbia University.

Less Formal Education: I’ve also studied Memoir Writing at Bard College, Fiction and Poetry at Dartmouth College, and Screenwriting at NYU.

Just For Fun But Still Relevant: I studied Acting with Uta Hagen at HB Studios and was a member of Chicago City Limits Improv group for a spell.