Laurel Corona

Laurel Corona has combined her love of writing and teaching for four decades, before retiring in 2014 as a professor of Humanities and World Religions at San Diego City College.

She is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. THE FOUR SEASONS: A NOVEL OF VIVALDI’S VENICE (Hyperion Books) has been translated into seventeen languages and won the Theodor Geisel Award, for Book of the Year from the San Diego Book Awards. Her nonfiction work includes UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH: A HOLOCAUST STORY OF LOVE AND PARTISAN RESISTANCE (St. Martin’s Press), which won a Christopher Medal in 2009 for “works that affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” PENELOPE’S DAUGHTER (Penguin/Berkley Books) and FINDING EMILIE (Simon and Schuster/Gallery) continue her award-winning fiction centering around forgotten stories of women. Laurel’s fourth novel, THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER (Sourcebooks) tells the story of the last generations of Jews in Spain before the expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella.

After a decade-long hiatus, Laurel has returned to historical fiction with her new novel, ALOHA WANDERWELL TAKES THE WHEEL (Sibylline Press), about a fearless teenaged girl from Vancouver Island who in the 1920s chased adventure, fame, and love across five continents in a Model T.

Since 2012 Laurel has worked as an enrichment lecturer for high-end cruise lines She has visited over ninety countries on every continent except Antarctica, and developed well in excess of one hundred lectures on history, arts, culture and personalities of the countries visited.

A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Laurel relocated from San Diego to Vancouver Island in 2020, and now lives in Victoria.