Dorothy Lazard is a writer, public historian, and former librarian. She is celebrated for her library career at the Oakland Main Library and for her 2023 memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, that tells the story of her youth in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, connecting her early intellectual pursuits to the career that made her a community pillar.

Her latest book, Behind the Desk at the Main, delves into her twenty-year career at the Oakland Main Library. It will be published by Heyday in August 2026.