Diane Lefer braids three strands of her life: writing, social justice work, and earning a living. See the Fiction page for information about her novels, story collections, and nonfiction books.
Besides Diane's widely published and often anthologized fiction, 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.
She 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 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.
Besides Diane's widely published and often anthologized fiction, 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.
She 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 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.
Some information you won’t find elsewhere on this website:
Diane has worked on an apple-pie-filling assembly line, in the Upward Bound program at a HBCU in Alabama, and picked potatoes--inspiration for her play Harvest, produced in Los Angeles by Playwrights' Arena.
Diane has worked on an apple-pie-filling assembly line, in the Upward Bound program at a HBCU in Alabama, and picked potatoes--inspiration for her play Harvest, produced in Los Angeles by Playwrights' Arena.
She has represented clients at administrative hearings in Maine, rode as a civilian observer with the NYPD, worked for the NYC Transit Authority, and spent years earning her keep as a temp. Her work as an animal behavior observer with the research department of the LA Zoo inspired much fiction and works for the stage. But much as she loves tigers and snow leopards and can happily watch uakaris, orangutans, and langurs for hours, she still says there’s no animal as beautiful and fascinating as a domestic feline. 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.)
Want more? Check out the Interviews page.
Want more? Check out the Interviews page.