Lisa Bayer is Director of the University of Georgia Press and past President of the Association of University Presses, a global publishing trade association. She has worked in book publishing for over 35 years. An Illinois native and first-generation college graduate, she holds a master’s degree in English from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Bayer is an executive committee member for the New Georgia Encyclopedia and a member of the Board of Directors for Georgia Humanities. At UGA she is a member of the Arts Council, a judge for the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and a former Women’s Leadership Fellow (2019-20). She has been published in Learned Publishing, Scholarly Kitchen, Publishers Weekly, and Against the Grain. The UGA Press is a founding partner of the English Department’s undergraduate Publishing Certificate program and hosts 15-20 paid student internships annually.