April 2015 -- Confessions of a Carnivore, from Fomite Press. Here's the early word (or words):Wow. Diane Lefer's new novel is one wild ride...by turns hilarious and tragic....And just when we're waiting for the next laugh, the novel surprises us by becoming something altogether more moving.--JJ Amaworo Wilson (He's a writer I admire. Looking forward to the forthcoming novel, Damnificados.)Lefer specializes in wise-guys, in women (mostly) who can finish your sentences, look into your soul, dismantle your pretensions....Diane Lefer has stories to tell, and she's clearly lived on the edges of things and thoughts that most people only read about--George Ovitt (and I highly recommend the litblog he writes with Peter Adam Nash: Talented Reader. Subscribe at http://talentedreader.blogspot.com/)The Fiery Alphabet was published on September 5, 2013. Robin Oliveira, author My Name Is Mary Sutter, says: "...enchanting and wondrous...In a voice as unique and thrilling as any I've encountered in literature, Daniela Messo seeks the secrets not only of her past, but of life itself." And in January, it was chosen as a Small Press Pick. http://smallpresspicks.com/the-fiery-alphabet/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, led writing workshops at the International Theatre Festival for Peace in Barrancabermeja, been active with the Colombia Peace Project and contributed articles about Colombia to Colombia Reports, CounterPunch, La Bloga, LA Progressive, New Clear Vision, ¡Presente! and TruthOut. She 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. Her stories have been widely published and anthologized and her books of fiction include 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), and Very Much Like Desire (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000), often address social issues. (Her crime novel, Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, published in 2012 by Rainstorm Press was described by Edgar Award winner Domenic Stansberry as "sifting the ashes of America's endless class warfare.") 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, men on parole, adjudicated youth in lockup and on probation, and in the foster-care system, refugee kids in Salt Lake City, and children surviving difficult circumstances in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Her ongoing collaboration with Hector 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, 2001) and workshops including a Theater of Witness production in 2013 in which torture survivors portrayed their own stories in their own words. They traveled to Northern Ireland in 2013 to work with community groups.Diane has received literary fellowship awards from the National Foundation 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.Author website: http://www.dianelefer.weebly.com