About the author

I was born in England, and emigrated to Northern California as a young wife with my husband and three  children, one a toddler of two years old. I immediately stumbled across California's Master Plan of Education and fell into Santa Rosa Junior College as a Freshman. After graduating from Sonoma State University with a bachelor's degree, I was awarded a National Defense Education Act Fellowship to study for a doctorate at the University of Southern California. I taught at Pomona College for several years and at  California State University, Los Angeles for twenty years, then chose to leave college teaching to write full time.

My interests are many and varied. I love music, especially chamber and orchestral music, and I have been studying piano since I was in my teens. Still, I can't call myself a pianist, or even a piano player. I am the eternal piano student, enjoying making music - for my ears only!

As a docent for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, I am privileged to go into elementary schools to talk to the students about  music and about the lives of the classical composers. For many of the children, this is their first exposure to “serious” music and it is a joy to get them up and dancing to Bach in the classroom,  and to see a teacher spinning a child around to an air by Vivaldi!

Crossword puzzles are another of my passions. I can't get to work in the morning  until I've had a cup of coffee and solved the Los Angeles Times puzzle.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. My articles and essays  have appeared in Family Circle, The Los Angeles Times, The Herald Examiner, The Daily News Magazine , L.A Parent Magazine,   Internal Affairs( (a publication of the American Red Cross), Bibliophilos, The American Sociologist, Society, Journalism Quarterly, and numerous other professional journals.

I am an experienced speaker and have been engaging  audiences for many years - as a professor, as a spokesman for the American Red Cross “Workplace Training” program, as a docent for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and in my workshops based on Falling in Love Again: The Mature Woman's Guide to Finding Romantic Fulfillment.

I  researched, wrote, and narrated Goodnight Children, Everywhere , a one hour documentary about the evacuation of London's children just before World War Two, for KCRW, (public radio), and I have appeared on Oprah; ABC's Good Morning America; NBC's Today Show; Mid-Morning LA; People are Talking; Sonya Live; In Print; The Parenting Network; Pacesetters; The Shirley Show (Toronto); Good Evening Moscow, and on Tom Snyder's Radio Show; The Jim Simon Show; Sonya Freedman Talk Radio; Vivian Porter Radio Show “Coming of Age” and more.

My new work is a novel: The Landscape of Our Life, and I hope to entice a publisher to take a look at it soon! Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York's Central Park, maintained that the landscape of our life shapes our nature, and it is that observation that underlies the novel. The story follows two sisters, Naomi and Marie, from 1939, when they were among the thousands of children evacuated from London just before the outbreak of World War Two, until the present - a wide swath of modern history, Circumstances lead them in different directions and into fascinating and varied lives - but you'll have to read the book!