About the Author

As a "woman of a certain age" like her heroine, Suzanne, Elaine Todd Koren has defied time by consistently bucking the tide. She is a Renaissance woman who modeled, acted, and studied art with Moses Soyer. She is both an accomplished painter and writer. Once a divorced single mother of two, during the day she worked in the New York City inner city school system as a teacher and then a guidance counselor, and at night she wrote. Her mystical stories of the children she met won the Educational Press and International Labor Press Association Awards.  Her first book, Flexible Guidance in the Elementary School (Prentice Hall) was very successful and was widely used in colleges.

She left the educational field to write full time and has published articles, contributed to anthologies writing on art and drama, and wrote two unpublished novels before starting Suzanne. For over eight years she researched in the United States and in France, the life of Suzanne Valadon and the people she touched. Koren presently resides in Woodstock, NY with her husband where she is working on her memoir.

   

 

Valadon and her son, Maurice, 1888

 

The Author and her son, Michael, 1951