The Hawkman: a Fairy Tale of the Great War

Jane Rosenberg LaForge was born in Los Angeles to a pair of political and news junkies. As a child, she grew up in Laurel Hills, a suburb adjacent to the storied, some say enchanted, enclave of visual artists, hippies, rock ‘n’ roll musicians, and Hollywood actors known as Laurel Canyon. This milieu shaped her lifelong fascination with history, politics, subcultures, and folklore. She also studied ballet, which introduced her to the world of fairy tales and legends of supernatural transformation.


Jane’s first professional writings were as a journalist. Her reporting took her throughout California, Maryland, and upstate New York. She enrolled in a graduate creative writing program in order to write a novel based on a court case she covered. Her studies led to a career as a college English instructor and writing literary criticism. She has published articles on fairy tales and the influence of African folklore on contemporary authors. As a college instructor, she has taught composition, children’s literature, and African American literature.


After the birth of her daughter in 2000, Jane found little time to write at length and began exploring poetry. In 2009, she published her first chapbook of poems and later brought together all her interests to write An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir. An Unsuitable Princess was an annotated fairy tale with poetry that told the story of her adolescence as a Hollywood outsider. All together she has published four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections. The most recent is Daphne and Her Discontents, an examination of the Greek myth of a girl who turns into a Laurel tree—which gave Jane’s childhood neighborhood its name—to avoid Apollo’s advances.


Jane now lives in New York with her husband, Patrick; daughter, Eva; and their cat, Zeka.