Personal BIO
Adair Lara’s Bio, by Adair Lara
I started my career in local magazines—first San Francisco Focus, the
city magazine, and then SF, a design mag at which I passed myself off as someone
passionately interested in interior design. (This amused my family no end.
They remembered my sitting on the new living room couch for six months before
jumping up and saying, "Hey! We have new furniture!")
All this time I was a fan of Jon Carroll, a columnist at the Chronicle. They
said of Charles McCabe, the curmudgeon found dead in his apartment that Jon
replaced, "The son of a bitch can write about anything.” It was
clear to me that Jon could do that too.
In 1989 my turn came. I’d been published freelance humor pieces in their
Sunday section, and the Chronicle offered me a column of my own, which I did
twice a week for 12 years. I’m no longer there (they sent me to the
Home and Garden section and I took the hint). I have published some ten books
or so, including several collections of columns, and do a lot of teaching.
My work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, Parenting, Glamour,
Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, American Woman, Departures, Westways, American
Way, Via, Fitness, Good Housekeeping, More and many other magazines and newspapers.
The Internet
I founded a web 2.0 website called Matchwriters.Com,
a place where aspiring writers can meet one another. It’s endorsed by
Amy Tan, Anne Lamott, Dorothy Allison, and Isabel Allende, among others...
Awards
1990: Associated Press, Best Columnist in California.
1997: Humor Columns for Newspapers over 100,000, National Society of Newspaper
Columnists
1998: same outfit, first place, general interest columns.
1999: second place, commentary, American Association of Sunday and Feature
editors contest, competing against papers with circulation over 300,000.
May 17, 2002 was declared Adair Lara Day in San Francisco by proclamation
of Mayor Willie Brown
