Diane Lefer
Diane Lefer is an author, playwright, and activist whose most recent book, California Transit, was published in April 2007 by Sarabande Books and awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her other books include two short story collections, The Circles I Move In (Zoland Books) and Very Much Like Desire (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and the novel, Radiant Hunger (Authors Choice). Her interviews with original social thinkers appear in The Sun while her stories, novels, and nonfiction often address social issues and draw on such experiences as going to jail for civil disobedience and her volunteer work as a legal assistant/interpreter for immigrants in detention. She collaborated with exiled Colombian theatre artist Hector Aristizábal on Nightwind, about his arrest and torture by the US-supported military in Colombia, a play that has toured the US, Canada, Europe, and India. Her other works for the stage have been produced in New York City and LA and points in-between. Recent talks, readings, and workshops have included appearances at Evergreen State College, Santa Monica College, University of Redlands, the Utah Humanities Literary Festival, and institutions including the Los Angeles Cathedral, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, and Secular Jewish Humanists of Los Angeles. She has picked potatoes, typed autopsy reports, surveyed parolees and drug addicts about their sex lives, and taught creative writing to gangbangers as well as, for twenty years, to graduate students in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.
|
|
