Jane Lazarre

Jane Lazarre is a prize-winning writer of fiction, memoir, essays and poetry. Her first memoir, The Mother Knot, was groundbreaking and a widely influential work still today. Her last memoir, The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter, detailed her formative experience growing up in a Jewish Communist community and the unique world view this upbringing instilled. Her memoir Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of A White Mother of Black Sons explored the transformation of her life from marrying into an African American family and raising two Black sons.

Lazarre’s novels include Inheritance, Some Place Quite Unknown, The Powers of Charlotte, On Loving Men, Some Kind of Innocence, and Worlds Beyond My Control, reissued in winter 2017 by Hamilton Stone Editions. In 2021 her first collection of poetry, Breaking Light, was published. 

Lazarre was a professor for over 40 years and 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. For decades she taught African American literature and women’s studies. She was a revered teacher who inspired generations of students to be brave and to write their stories – and to read African American fiction and autobiography, as a way to understand America. Upon retirement from The New School, she taught writing privately – memoir, poetry and narrative – to psycho-analysts. Lazarre earned her BA from City College, her MA in Anthropology from the New School and completed two years of graduate study in psycho-analytic thought. She lived in New York City throughout her life.

Lazarre died at the age of eighty-one on June 19, 2025.