As a “woman of a certain age” like her heroine, Suzanne, Elaine Todd Koren has defied time by consistently bucking the tide. A renaissance woman who modeled, acted and studied art with Moses Soyer, she is both an accomplished painter and a writer. A divorced single mother of two, she worked in the New York inner- city school system both as a teacher and guidance counselor, and at night she wrote. Her mystical short stories of the children she met won first prize in both the Educational Press and International Labor Press Association awards. Her guidance book for the elementary school teacher (Prentice-Hall) was successful, well reviewed and widely used in colleges. She left the educational field to write full time and has published articles, contributed to anthologies and then worked on the biographical novel, Suzanne. For many years she researched, in the United States and in France, the life of Suzanne Valadon, the French painter and the people she touched. Ms. Koren presently resides in New York City with her husband where she is working on a memoir.
