About the Author of The Cerebral Jukebox
Susan Margulies Kalish was born in New York City where she has lived and worked her entire life. She was raised in a middle-class housing development on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, known as "Stuyvesant Town." Right after World War II, at a time when there was a severe housing shortage, many veterans were able to find affordable housing in this new, eighty-acre apartment complex, built where aging tenements once stood. She was one of many children who felt lucky to grow up in this mid-city haven.
Kalish is a product of the New York City school system and The City University of New York. She attended C.C.N.Y. (where she studied writing under the late Eve Merriam), and Hunter College. She took post-graduate sabbatical courses at N.Y.U., The School of Visual Arts, The New School, Fashion Institute of Technology, and Queensborough Community College.
She has had a cosmetics business, she has written, illustrated and produced her own line of greeting cards, she designs and creates glass and crystal jewelry, she collects antique and vintage charms and recreates charm bracelets, she is an avid photographer and blogger.
But what she feels is most important is her service in the New York City Department of Education and the Committee on Special Education where she worked with children from preschool through high school, ages three to twenty-one. She taught and evaluated students who were speech, language, hearing impaired, and deaf, as well as other students with special needs for thirty-three years.
She is a breast cancer survivor.
Kalish is now retired. She spends her time blogging, taking photographs, writing, and replaying memories.