Among the numerous honors awarded to Lane is an appointment as the Louisiana State Poet Laureate, making her the first African American to hold the post (1989–92).
In an interview with the critic John Lowe in 2005, she notes that the racial incidents that she witnessed in the Mid-Atlantic region were indelibly embedded in her psyche.
[3] Her parents forded the Great Depression and the ensuing years of austerity and managed to put their daughter through school at a high cost.
After Lane's graduation from the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1940 her father, William Alexander Gordon, died and she was pressed to take a job in a sewing factory.
After five years of intense work and the death of her mother she applied for and received a four-year scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Before the inauguration of Black Studies in the late 1960s, writers such as Lane considered themselves to be autodidacts, tracing the contours of a tradition that had been, in large part, excluded from the scholarly arena.