BIO
Diane Lefer dropped out of college decades ago and ran away to Oaxaca, Mexico. Her life in Mexico informed much of the
fiction in her first short-story collection, The Circles I Move In (Zoland Books, 1994), while her love and respect for Latin America continues to inform her work as author, playwright, and activist. She has served as a bilingual interviewer for
an AIDS prevention and education project in Harlem and the South Bronx and as a volunteer legal assistant and interpreter for immigrants held in detention centers in Los Angeles County. She collaborated with Colombian exile Hector
Aristizábal on Nightwind, a play that has toured the world about his arrest and torture by the US-trained military. She has visited Colombia with Witness for Peace as well as as a workshop leader at the International Theatre Festival for Peace in Barrancabermeja. Educar es fiesta, a Bolivian nonprofit, has invited her to Cochabamba to work with youth and families. Here in the US, her connection to Latin American issues led to her work with the Colombia Peace Project and to articles in ¡Presente!, published by School of the Americas Watch.
Diane has worked on an apple-pie-filling assembly line, picked potatoes--inspiration for her play Harvest, produced in Los Angeles by Playwrights' Arena, typed autopsy reports, and spent years as a temp. Her work as an animal behavior
observer with the research department of the LA Zoo has inspired much fiction as well as the play Majikan, featuring an orangutan, produced in New York City by Ciona Taylor Productions. When author François Camoin accused her of
having an unwholesome relationship with her cat, she was inspired to write the musical, American Buggery, produced by Trustus Theatre, Columbia, SC and based on court records from colonial New England about men hanged for bestiality. (She was subsequently the object of amorous advances by a drill baboon at the LA Zoo but as a proper behavioral observer she had been trained not to interact.) Her play, Penalty Phase, was used as a fundraiser for the JusticeWorks campaign, Mothers in Prison/Children in Crisis. She has collaborated as a playwright with The Internationalists, a global theatre directors' collective.
Her stories have been widely published and anthologized and her books of fiction including California Transit (awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize, Sarabande Books, 2007), Radiant Hunger (Authors Choice, 2001, named by PEN USA as one of the ten best fiction books of the year by authors west of the Mississippi), Very Much Like Desire (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000), and Nobody Wakes Up Pretty (forthcoming 2012, Rainstorm Press) often address social issues.
Diane taught for 23 years in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as for semesters in the MFA Program at Antioch-Los Angeles and for the Writers Program at UCLA Extension. She has been a guest artist at many colleges and festivals and has facilitated creative workshops for high school students, adjudicated youth in lockup and on probation, and in the foster-care system. She contributes articles to LA Progressive and New Clear Vision.
Her ongoing collaboration with Hector and his nonprofit organization ImaginAction includes work for the stage and for the
page (notably the book, The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation, Lantern Books, 2010) and social-justice action workshops, including work in alliance with the Youth Justice Coalition, a grassroots organization of young people who've been directly impacted by the juvenile justice system because they or close family members have been locked up. Diane's involvement in juvenile in/justice was sparked by the case of Duc Ta, who has become a friend and whose unjust imprisonment she continues to write about.
Diane 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 is a member of PEN USA, Dramatists Guild, Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, NoPassport Pan American collective, and the ACLU.
Contact: DianeLefer@gmail.com
Diane Lefer dropped out of college decades ago and ran away to Oaxaca, Mexico. Her life in Mexico informed much of the
fiction in her first short-story collection, The Circles I Move In (Zoland Books, 1994), while her love and respect for Latin America continues to inform her work as author, playwright, and activist. She has served as a bilingual interviewer for
an AIDS prevention and education project in Harlem and the South Bronx and as a volunteer legal assistant and interpreter for immigrants held in detention centers in Los Angeles County. She collaborated with Colombian exile Hector
Aristizábal on Nightwind, a play that has toured the world about his arrest and torture by the US-trained military. She has visited Colombia with Witness for Peace as well as as a workshop leader at the International Theatre Festival for Peace in Barrancabermeja. Educar es fiesta, a Bolivian nonprofit, has invited her to Cochabamba to work with youth and families. Here in the US, her connection to Latin American issues led to her work with the Colombia Peace Project and to articles in ¡Presente!, published by School of the Americas Watch.
Diane has worked on an apple-pie-filling assembly line, picked potatoes--inspiration for her play Harvest, produced in Los Angeles by Playwrights' Arena, typed autopsy reports, and spent years as a temp. Her work as an animal behavior
observer with the research department of the LA Zoo has inspired much fiction as well as the play Majikan, featuring an orangutan, produced in New York City by Ciona Taylor Productions. When author François Camoin accused her of
having an unwholesome relationship with her cat, she was inspired to write the musical, American Buggery, produced by Trustus Theatre, Columbia, SC and based on court records from colonial New England about men hanged for bestiality. (She was subsequently the object of amorous advances by a drill baboon at the LA Zoo but as a proper behavioral observer she had been trained not to interact.) Her play, Penalty Phase, was used as a fundraiser for the JusticeWorks campaign, Mothers in Prison/Children in Crisis. She has collaborated as a playwright with The Internationalists, a global theatre directors' collective.
Her stories have been widely published and anthologized and her books of fiction including California Transit (awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize, Sarabande Books, 2007), Radiant Hunger (Authors Choice, 2001, named by PEN USA as one of the ten best fiction books of the year by authors west of the Mississippi), Very Much Like Desire (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000), and Nobody Wakes Up Pretty (forthcoming 2012, Rainstorm Press) often address social issues.
Diane taught for 23 years in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as for semesters in the MFA Program at Antioch-Los Angeles and for the Writers Program at UCLA Extension. She has been a guest artist at many colleges and festivals and has facilitated creative workshops for high school students, adjudicated youth in lockup and on probation, and in the foster-care system. She contributes articles to LA Progressive and New Clear Vision.
Her ongoing collaboration with Hector and his nonprofit organization ImaginAction includes work for the stage and for the
page (notably the book, The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation, Lantern Books, 2010) and social-justice action workshops, including work in alliance with the Youth Justice Coalition, a grassroots organization of young people who've been directly impacted by the juvenile justice system because they or close family members have been locked up. Diane's involvement in juvenile in/justice was sparked by the case of Duc Ta, who has become a friend and whose unjust imprisonment she continues to write about.
Diane 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 is a member of PEN USA, Dramatists Guild, Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights, NoPassport Pan American collective, and the ACLU.
Contact: DianeLefer@gmail.com
