Please direct all media and speaking inquiries to Leah’s publicist:

Angela Melamud

Leah Lax was raised in a Jewish family in Dallas, Texas, close to a generation of immigrants, so that, growing up, she learned both to crochet and ride a horse. Then she joined the hasidim and spent thirty years among them attempting to reclaim the roots her family had left behind. Now on the other side of all that and grateful for second chances, she has published award-winning fiction, nonfiction and prose poetry.

When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera with composer Christopher Theofanidis to celebrate local immigrants, she sought out people willing to tell her about their journeys to the United States. The result was transformative. It was if she had discovered America, found its great, beating heart. Lax has had a dual career as an author and a librettist. Her previous book—now an opera by composer Lori Laitman—is Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, the first gay memoir to come out of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox world. Learn More

“When I lived in the Hasidic world, mine were the only people fully real to me,” Leah Lax writes in the powerful compilation that is Not from Here: The Song of America. Exiled from the only world she knew once she began to live openly as a lesbian, Lax embarks on a quest to understand the true plurality of our national identity. This chorus of voices, from the brutal to the ecstatic, is both a love song and an indictment of what it means to be ‘an American.”

Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“With breathtaking compassion, Leah Lax honors the deeply personal and often traumatic journeys recounted to her by turning them into a mirror. Reading Not From Here becomes an infinitely rich experience of shared humanity. ‘We are you,’ these stories sing. ‘Our struggles are your struggles.’ Leah’s passionate eloquence is profoundly important for us and for our world.”

Anthony Freud, OBE, General Director, Lyric Opera Chicago