Author Leslie Lawrence will read from her debut collection, The Death of Fred Astaire–and Other Essays from a Life Outside the Lines (SUNY Press).

As a child of the sixties, Leslie Lawrence knew she didn’t want to duplicate her parents lives, yet she never imagined she’d stray so far outside the lines of their and her own expectations. The Death of Fred Astaire opens with the story, both wrenching and funny, of how Lawrence says her goodbyes to the iconic images she’s held since her youth; she then proceeds to bear a child and raise him with her lesbian partner. Some essays in this debut collection reflect on legacies Lawrence inherited from her Jewish family and culture. In others, she searches gamely for a rich, authentic life a voice, a vocation, a community, even a god she can call her own.
 
Always a seeker, an adventurer resisting fear, Lawrence, a city girl, creates a summer home in the back woods of the Live Free or Die state. She attempts the flying trapeze and takes part in a cross-dressing workshop. Traveling alone to Morocco, she assists a veterinarian tending to an ailing donkey. Teaching in a vocational high school in Boston, she questions her methods and assumptions about race and class. With rare honesty, she confronts the complexities of motherhood, of caring for her ill partner, and of widowhood. In “Wonderlust,” the collection’s most ambitious piece, she explores the role of beauty and creativity in our spiritual lives, revealing how lifelong learning in dance, music, and the visual arts can make us all more alive even as we age.

Leslie Lawrence was raised in Queens and attended New York City’s public schools. A graduate of Oberlin College, Brown University, and Goddard College’s M.F.A. program (now Warren Wilson), Lawrence was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been widely published in many journals, periodicals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Boston Globe, The Women’s Review of Books, Women on Women, Feeding the Hungry Heart, Lesbians Raising Sons et al. She is a world traveller and an active practitioner of contact improvisation.