Allison Sarnoff Soffer is a writer and a teacher at Temple Sinai Nursery School in Washington DC. She especially enjoys writing for and about children. Apple Days is her first book.Allison worked as a program officer at the National Endowment for the Arts and published in Scholastic News, The Washington Post, and Who Cares Magazine before becoming an active stay-at-home mom for eleven years. When she decided to return to work, she realized a lifelong goal of becoming a teacher. Music, literature, and the arts are central to her work with children.As a child, Allison studied at American Ballet Theatre where she remembers classes at the company's former Manhattan studios with live piano accompaniment. She performed children's roles in New York area productions - most notably as Clara in the Nutcracker Suite with the Eglevsky Ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at Nassau Coliseum. Allison attended Princeton and Columbia Universities and received her Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland with her husband and two children.