Dorothy Lazard

Dorothy Lazard is widely known as a librarian and public historian. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of Oakland Public Library’s Oakland History Center, where she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history. Her memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, is an intellectual coming-of-age story set in San Francisco and Oakland during the heady 1960s and 1970s.  She is currently at work on a nonfiction book about the Oakland Public Library where she worked for twenty years.