Born in Brooklyn, NY, he has been involved in the development of "creative nonfiction" in the United States, creating graduate programs, writing theoretically about the essay, and mentoring and publishing many subsequent writers of note.

[5] When the Ohio Review was shuttered, he founded the literary magazine Hotel Amerika in 2001, which continues toward its twentieth year.

[18] Forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press are Stories of the Street, prose poems and mini-essays with photographs of found texts, and Double Indemnities, epistolary essays in collaboration with women writers.

[22] Lazar has published his essays and prose poetry in the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Essay,The Southwest Review, Black Clock, Gulf Coast, North Dakota Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, River Teeth, Essay Daily, The Normal School, The Bellingham Review and many anthologies, including Bending Genre, The Science of Story, Like Thunder: American Poets Respond to Violence, Short Flights 2, After Montaigne, etc.

[23] Lazar's work was included in The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate.