Steve Wasserman discusses his new book published by Heyday, Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie, with Dorothy Lazard at Clio’s in Oakland.

In-person event. 353 Grand Avenue Oakland, CA.

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday. A 1974 graduate of UC Berkeley, he holds a degree in criminology. His past positions include being deputy editor of the op-ed page and opinion section of the Los Angeles Times; editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; editorial director of New Republic Books; publisher and editorial director of Hill and Wang at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and of the Noonday Press; editorial director of Times Books at Random House; and editor at large for Yale University Press. A former partner of the literacy agency Kneerim & Williams, he represented many authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Linda Ronstadt, Robert Scheer, and David Thomson. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Dorothy Lazard began her library career at UC Berkeley, where she received her Master of Library and Information Studies degree in 1983. After working several years on the Berkeley campus, she joined the staff of the Oakland Main Library In 2000. There she was responsible for the history, biography, architecture, and map collections. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she managed the Library’s Oakland History Center, where she hosted and delivered history lectures, mounted exhibits, and wrote articles about Oakland history. She is widely celebrated for encouraging people of all ages, cultures, and educational levels to explore local history, with several authors citing in their acknowledgements their appreciation for her assistance. For her work, she has received the Partners in Preservation Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oakland Heritage Alliance (2022) and the Oscar Lewis Award for outstanding contributions to Western History (2023) from the Book Club of California. Dorothy is also a writer who holds a MFA degree in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. Her memoir, titled What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, about growing up in the Bay Area during the heady 1960s and ‘70s, was published in 2023 by Heyday Books.