Jen Lazar

Jen Lazar is at work on a multi-generational family memoir about migration, postage stamps, and alchemy, in which she tracks her great-grandfather's journey from his escape from the Jewish ghetto in Iran to his fabulously successful trading-stamp empire, which was his family legacy. The memoir travels from revolutionary Tehran in the 1910s, to Paris at the rise of WWII, to the New York building boom and the occult in Europe in the 1960s. Along the way, postage stamps are traded in street markets, hidden under floor boards, printed in basements, and exchanged for the family's freedom in America.

Lazar is the winner of the Ploughshares 2023 Emerging Writer's Contest. She received her Masters of Education degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She lives in Burington Vermont.