Writer of fiction and non-fiction, including memoir, journalism and essay.

Jane Lazarre is a prize-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction and poetry. Her memoir, The Communist and The Communist’s Daughter, was published in Fall, 2017 by Duke University Press. In 2021 she published her first collection of poetry, Breaking Light.  Her previous memoirs, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of A White Mother of Black Sons (reissued in a special 20th anniversary edition), Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery, and The Mother Knot, are also published by Duke University Press. Other recent works include the essays, “Once White in America,” “On The Problems of Breathing in America” (both widely published on line), “Politics and Art,” in the anthology, The Racial Imaginary, Editor, Claudia Rankine et al.; and “Hoarding,” a story, in Hamilton Stone Review.  Novels include Inheritance, Some Place Quite Unknown, The Powers of Charlotte, and Worlds Beyond My Control, reissued in winter, 2017, by Hamilton Stone Editions.

Lazarre has taught writing and literature at the City College of New York, Yale University and Eugene Lang College at the New School, where she created and directed the undergraduate writing program and served on the full-time faculty for many years.  She serves on the board of directors of The Brotherhood Sister Sol, an organization in Harlem that serves children and youth in New York City and across the country, and as an Advisor to Persimmon Tree, a literary journal on line for women writers and artists.  She lives in New York City where she teaches writing privately to individual students.