photo by Cathy Raff
Bio
As soon as she learned of the discovery of the first-century tombstone that inspired Rebel Daughter, Lori Banov Kaufmann wanted to know more. She was so intrigued by the unlikely but true love story the stone revealed that she embarked on a more than ten-year quest with some of the world's leading scholars and archaeologists to bring the real characters to life as accurately as possible.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Lori was a strategy consultant for high-tech companies. She has an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a masters from Harvard. She lives in Israel with her husband and four adult children.
The (Unofficial!) Bio
Lori was born in New Orleans and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She is a debut fiction author at the ripe young age of 61 after a twisty, detour-filled career path. While in grad school (many, many moons ago) she and her husband Yadin wrote The Ice Cream Lover’s Guide to Boston (Addison-Wesley Publishing). While this important addition to the literary canon never made it on to the bestseller lists, it did get the authors a lot of free ice cream!
The intervening years were filled with moving to Israel, raising four amazing children who are now (miraculously) real adult people, and working as a strategy consultant for high-tech companies. Her expertise was helping military companies commercialize their technology for civilian applications. Based on her work with one client which used electro-optics to find defects in bullets, Kaufmann started her own company using light to find something else hard to catch - and arguably, more important – head lice. Unfortunately, the lice device didn’t work. Upon retiring from consulting, Lori went back to one of her first loves, writing.