Joan Steinau Lester

"What, another book already?" friends exclaim. "You must be so disciplined." They shake their heads in disbelief.

Well, no, not really. The fact is that I love to write. Shaping each sentence, piling them up one upon another in a logical sequence, creating a clear beginning, middle, and end--all these activities fill me with  Read More 

Being a full-time writer is a strange occupation. I work all day alone in a tiny cottage behind my house, hunched over my computer, lost in an imaginary world. If I weren't producing coherent literature, some might consider this behavior peculiar, at best--or worthy of psychiatric intervention.

Even at night my characters follow me,  Read More 

At twenty I married a writer, though I had no idea how to become one myself. The year before I’d stood on a street corner at a New York City pay phone and called Simon and Schuster, telling the woman I reached that I wanted to be “an editor or a writer.” No one at the house was the least bit impressed, or intereted. Read More 

Nan Fink Gefen: Can you tell us about the genesis of Mama’s Child?

Joan Lester: I’m a member of a biracial family and also a veteran of the civil rights and women’s liberations movements, which rocked this country during the 1960s and ’70s--and we’re still feeling the ripples. Those movements  Read More