Lane Igoudin, PhD, is a Los Angeles-based writer, blogger, language professor, and a proud Dad of two teens. He writes narrative non-fiction about foster and adoptive parenting, gay fatherhood, mindfulness and spiritual growth in the Jewish and Buddhist traditions, and conducts research in writing pedagogy and sociolinguistics (use of language in society). He also reviews books in all these subjects. A graduate of CSU Long Beach and Stanford University, Lane teaches English and linguistics at Los Angeles City College and was a recent Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the EPIC Program of the Humanities Division of UCLA.

His recent publications include:

• a guide to public policies, legislative mandates, and legal opinions for prospective foster/adoptive parents on Adoption.com, the world’s #1 adoption site
• 2022 Father’s Day reflections on his daughter’s graduation, published by Family Equality.org. It follows the previous year’s Father’s Day feature on the joys and challenges as raising daughters (republished by Bay Windows, Boston), and an earlier Family Equality.org blog post, which commemorated the International LGBTQ Family Day.
• an essay on multiracial histories within an intersectional gay family in the annual issue of The Citadel, a juried literary journal published in Los Angeles.
• “The iPad Wars,” a parenting essay on teens vs. technology published in September 2022 by the StoryHouse Writers’ Showcase of The Preservation Foundation, originally printed in The Citadel (2018).
• a chapter on autobiographic writing as a tool to spotlight larger social issues in Writing as Performance anthology (Cambridge Scholars (UK), 2022)
• book reviews for Lambda Literary Review (Colm Toibin’s The Magician, a novelized biography of Thomas Mann, 2022) and Applied Jewish Spirituality (Rav Kook’s biography in the Jewish Lives series, Yale U. Press, 2022)
• a chapter in an anthology of language studies of social inequality and injustice (London: Routledge, 2021)
• a chapter on teaching English from culturally affirming and decolonizing perspectives in the upcoming volume on language pedagogy (London: Routledge, 2023)

Since 2020, drawing on his dual background in Judaism and Zen, Lane has been contributing regularly to the blog of the Applied Jewish Spirituality institute based in Jerusalem, publishing 16 posts so far, including a serialized blog on incorporating mindfulness into daily spiritual activities. His travel / spirituality essay is included in the current (Winter 2023) issue of Parabola: The Search for Meaning magazine. A Soto Zen practitioner for more than 25 years, Lane received jukai, a lay ordination, from Zen Center Los Angeles, studied the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and earned the Community Group Facilitator certification from The Mussar Institute. His Blessing the Sea newsletter, published regularly on this site, features traditional and innovative ways to bring spirituality and mindfulness into daily life.

For more information on these and other publications, please here. 

Lane is a member of the LGBTQ and College Creative Writing Caucuses of the Association of Writing and Writing Programs (AWP). At AWP 2022 in Philadelphia, he moderated a panel on literary journals published by community colleges. At AWP 2020 in San Antonio, he participated in the “More Than Me: Memoirists Looking Outward” panel on using a personal memoir to address larger social issues. At the same conference, he also moderated a panel on the strategies to engage bilingual / ESL college students in creative writing and later wrote about it for California Writers Club, UCLA Excellence in Pedagogy newsletter, and the AWP 2-Year Creative Writing Caucus blog. His chapter “The Legal and the Human: Spotlighting Social Issues through Memoiristic Writing,” documenting and evaluating the experience of writing about the adoptive parenting experience, was included in the anthology Writing as Performance (Cambridge Scholars (UK), 2022).

In December 2022, Lane published his first book review for Lambda Literary Review. Previously, he spoke on the queer-identified writer/parent panel “Our Families, Our Stories: Writing and Parenting in the Trenches” at a Lambda LitFest. There, as well as at AWP 2019 in Portland, AWP 2020 in San Antonio, and at the virtual AWP 2021, he participated in public readings.

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