Diane Lefer braids three strands of her life: writing, social justice work, and earning a living. Besides her widely published and often anthologized fiction - see on Amazon's site - her essays and advocacy journalism have appeared frequently in LA Progressive and New Clear Vision as well as in The Believer, Colombia Reports, Connotation Press, CounterPunch, La Bloga, Numéro Cinq, The Sun, and TruthOut.
Her latest novel, Out of Place, will be published by Fomite Press on September 13, 2021.
Diane has picked potatoes, typed autopsy reports, served as a bilingual interviewer for an AIDS prevention and education project in Harlem and the South Bronx, as Special Assistant to the Inspector General of the NYC Transit Authority, and as a volunteer legal assistant and interpreter for immigrants held in detention centers in Los Angeles County and stuck in Tijuana at the border. She’s worked with men on parole and registered eligible voters in the LA County Jails.
For more than 20 years, Diane has worked with the Program for Torture Victims-LA which, since 1980, has been treating the physical and psychological consequences of torture as well as addressing other needs of survivors from all over the world as they begin to heal and rebuild their lives. Her long-term ongoing collaboration with Colombian theater artist, psychologist Hector Aristizábal – himself a survivor – has included both writing and theater projects as well as social justice action workshops both in the US and abroad.
She turns to the company of non-human animals when seeing what people do to each other gets to be too much. Diane has studied animal behavior for the Research Department of the Los Angeles Zoo for decades and brings attention and affection to the rescue cats at the Amanda Foundation.
Though she never received a college degree, for 23 years Diane was on the faculty of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as for semesters in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch-Los Angeles and the Writers Program at UCLA Extension.
She has received literary fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles) as well as five PEN Syndicated Fiction Prizes. She has been a finalist for the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, the Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction, and the Editors Book Award. She has enjoyed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and three glorious stays at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.
April 2015 -- Confessions of a Carnivore, from Fomite Press.
Wow. Diane Lefer’s new novel is one wild ride...by turns hilarious and tragic....And just when we’re waiting for the next laugh, the novel surprises us by becoming something altogether more moving.--JJ Amaworo Wilson (He's a writer I admire. Looking forward to the forthcoming novel, Damnificados.)
Lefer specializes in wise-guys, in women (mostly) who can finish your sentences, look into your soul, dismantle your pretensions....Diane Lefer has stories to tell, and she's clearly lived on the edges of things and thoughts that most people only read about--George Ovitt (and I highly recommend the litblog he writes with Peter Adam Nash: Talented Reader. Subscribe at
http://talentedreader.blogspot.com/)
September 5, 2013 --The Fiery Alphabet, from Loose Leaves Press.
"...enchanting and wondrous...In a voice as unique and thrilling as any I've encountered in literature, Daniela Messo seeks the secrets not only of her past, but of life itself." -- Robin Oliveira, author My Name Is Mary Sutter
In January, it was chosen as a Small Press Pick. http://smallpresspicks.com/the-fiery-alphabet/
April 2007 -- California Transit, from Sarabande Books, Mary McCarthy Prize
"[Lefer] salvages small, strange stuff and assembles it into a narrative of alarming beauty and mystery and sadness. And in the longing these particular moments strung together in this particular way have created in us, we follow her anywhere."
~Carole Maso
"[T]hese stories...are smart, well written and have that most elusive of qualities: vitality. They take on dif-ficult issues — immigration, racism, torture, animal suffering, environmental degradation. That makes her stories sound humorless; they aren't. A vein of wry wit runs through them."
~Judith Freeman, Los Angeles Times
"[A]s memorable and satisfying as any fiction. In other words, grab this book--you will not be disappoint-ed, for each of her stories is a well-told and compelling gem."
~Oscar Hijuelos
Author website: http://www.dianelefer.weebly.com
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