Outsider's Reverie
Leslie Evans was born in New York City in 1942 into a family absorbed by spiritualism and the occult. Raised in Los Angeles he read widely in the literature of literary outsiders, frequented the coffee houses of the late fifties, and took an active part in the civil rights movement sparked by the Freedom Rides and lunch counter sit-ins. In 1961 he joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, where he was active in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and then for twelve years on the organization's professional staff in New York City, during and massive anti-Vietnam War movement in which this organization played a key part.While in New York he served for four years as Managing Editor ofWorld Outlook(later,Intercontinental Press), the weekly news service of the Trotskyist Fourth International. For another four years he was e ditor of the International Socialist Review, the party's monthly journal.From 1979 to 1982 Evans lived in Virginia, Minnesota, where he worked in an industrial electric motor repair shop and was on the labor crew in the iron mines and a member of the Steelworkers Union.Returning to Los Angeles, he did graduate work in sociology at UCLA. Beginning in 1986 he worked as a staff research associate and editor at UCLA's Center for Pacific Rim Studies; was production editor for six years ofChinese Science,annual journal of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine; and was program officer for the university's Asia-Pacific Institute.A high point of that period was two years in Geneva and Los Angeles as production editor of a major World Health Organization report documenting the failure to invest in research on the diseases that ravage the third world. He also has served as an editor for studies by the World Bank.From 2001 to 2005 Evans was website and publications manager for UCLA's International Institute, where as their web journalist he covered talks by Mikhail Gorbachev, John Kerry, Warren Christopher, Edward Said, Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, General Anthony Zinni, Shimon Peres, and former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda.Evans is the author of China After Mao (1978) and editor of some ten other books, including the standard library edition of Leon Trotsky's writings on China.In 1988 Leslie Evans and his wife Jennifer Charnofsky moved to the predominately black and Latino West Adams section of South Los Angeles near USC, where they restored a 1910 Craftsman home that became a city Historic Cultural Monument. Evans has been deeply involved as an activist in his community, during the gang wars of the early 1990s and up to the present, serving on the board of one of the city's volunteer neighborhood councils and several other community organizations.