We are sad to learn of the passing of writer and teacher Jane Lazarre earlier this month at the age of 81. Lazarre was the author of several books with the Press.

We first published Lazarre’s Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons in 1996, and brought out a twentieth-anniversary edition in 2016. Alice Walker called the book “an important affirmation of a white woman’s love of her Black sons.” Originally published in 1976, we brought a new edition of The Mother Knot into print in 1997. Adrienne Rich said of the classic, “I cannot imagine a woman who would not be moved, or a man who would not be enlightened.”…

Read More:
https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2025/06/27/farewell-to-jane-lazarre/

Writer Jane Lazarre is no stranger to the pages of Lilith; an excerpt from her provocative and resonant novel, Inheritance, appeared in the Summer 2009 issue, and her memoirs The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter and The Mother Knot were both the subjects of previous conversations with Lilith’s editors.

Now Lazarre (author of ten previous books and creator of the undergraduate writing program at Eugene Lang College at the New School) is back, this time with a collection of poetry—her first—entitled Breaking Light (Hamilton Stone Editions, $16.95) and she once again talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about some of her recurring themes and the role of the poet in the world today.

Read More:
https://lilith.org/2021/08/jane-lazarre-on-how-this-age-of-crisis-affects-our-inner-worlds/