Known to friends as Tim or “TL”, Timothy Lane was raised in western Massachusetts. He earned a BA degree in United States history at Georgetown University, a PhD in African history from Stanford University, and a Master’s in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. His hobbies and passions as a young boy included reading the Encyclopedia Americana and National Geographic at random, studying maps and atlases, and swimming the breaststroke for the Westfield, Mass. YMCA youth swim team. Tim has spent has spent much of the last 30 years as a teacher and scholar shuttling between the US and South Africa: first as a volunteer teacher in a rural high school in the northern Limpopo region of South Africa; then doing oral historical research in those rural communities as well as South African national archives in Pretoria; and since 2003 working with international public health scholars and community organizations throughout the US and South Africa to end the HIV epidemic. He has lived in the Bay Area since 1993, and has called Oakland home since 2015.

Tim has been journaling since he was a teenager, and has been engaged in creative writing as a hobby for most of his adult life. He’s been working on That First Novel Manuscript for around 12 years now without much luck, and became an accidental poet as he grappled with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tim also inherited a passion for amateur photography from his father, who gifted him a Pentax K1000 for his college graduation 32 years ago, and has since dabbled with various brands of digital SLRs. Unfortunately he has had consistent bad luck with retaining nice cameras since that original Pentax was “redistributed” in a 1995 Johannesburg house burglary, so he just uses whatever’s on his phone these days.