Laurel Corona, Author

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Biography

The author, with the Pieta in the background, January 2006

I have loved reading and writing ever since my older sister came home from first grade to teach me what she had learned that day. My first publications were in the Oakland Tribune in a weekly section for children called "Aunt Elsie's Page," and a newspaper I put out for my family which featured reviews of what I was reading and news about what was happening in the lives of my dolls.

I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me from the beginning, and who showed their support by giving up much of what they must have wanted for themselves so my sister and I could get the best possible education. As a result, by the time I graduated from The Bishop's School in 1967 and enrolled as an English major at the University of California at Davis, I had come to appreciate that good writing is extraordinarily difficult but well worth the effort. I couldn't believe I could get a degree by devouring novels and poetry in bed in my pajamas, and writing papers on ideas that burned in me as I read, but it turned out to be largely true. Graduate school at the University of Chicago (MA 1972) and again at Davis (Ph.D, 1982) followed.

Professionally, early in my career I was both an instructor and an administrator of academic support programs at San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego. I came to San Diego City College in 1990, first as a dean and then as a full-time professor of English and Humanities. I also freelanced in the 1990s, writing approximately 20 Young Adult titles for Lucent Books.

I am an avid tennis player, fair-weather sailor, intrepid traveler, voracious reader, loyal Padres fan, and a pretty good chef.

"Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion--the oily rags of the head and heart." Stanley Elkin

MY BOOKS

THE FOUR SEASONS
Two sisters abandoned at Venice's Pieta escape the drudgery of their cloistered lives though the music of their mentor, Antonio Vivaldi. Coming November 4, 2008 from Hyperion/Voice.

PENELOPE'S DAUGHTER
The story of those left behind in Ithaca when Odysseus goes off to the Trojan War, told by a daughter he doesn't even know exists. All rights available.

UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH
A chronicle of the Jewish partisans of Vilna, focusing on the life of one young couple, Leizer and Zenia Lewinson Bart, who met and married in the ghetto, then escaped to fight with the famed partisan group "The Avengers." Written by Laurel Corona, with primary research by Michael Bart, Until Our Last Breath is published by St. Martin's Press.

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