Helen Borten

Helen Borten (b. 1930) is an American author and illustrator of books for children, and an award-winning broadcast journalist.

Early life and education Helen Borten was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father, a jeweler who had fallen into financial difficulty due to the Great Depression, abandoned the family on the day of her birth. He re-entered her life when she was eight years old.

Borten attended the Philadelphia Museum College of Art on a full scholarship, and intended to become a painter. She described her first few years after art school as "trudging [her] portfolio around NYC from art director to art director," which resulted in work as a freelance illustrator for book jackets, album covers, and greeting cards.

Children's books Helen Borten began writing and illustrating books for children in the late 1950s and continued her work throughout the 1960s. Her first published book was Little Big-Feather (1956), written by Joseph Longstreth with illustrations by Borten. Little Big-Feather was named one of the ten best illustrated books of 1956 by The New York Times. Borten appeared on that list again in 1959 with Do You See What I See?, her first book as sole author and illustrator. She went on to write a total of nine books of her own and illustrated, by her estimate, more than 20 others, including several from the Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science books series.

Borten used the monotype technique for her illustrations, working with oil paint on glass to make a transfer print. She began volunteering at the public radio station WNYC in New York City, where she worked with Leonard Lopate on his weekly program New York and Company. She was quickly hired on as an assistant producer at WNYC, creating award-winning work for the station over the course of two years before losing her job during staff-wide layoffs.

The series was edited by Borten herself, and was initially funded using $ grant awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Awards and honors Helen Borten won a Peabody Award for her 1991 audio documentary The Case Against Women: Sexism in the Courts, produced for NPR's Horizons program while she was still on staff at WNYC. Borten said she was proud of receiving this award, adding "I feel good about giving a voice to people who have no voice and trying to show the less fortunate as the human beings they are."

Borten has been honored twice by the National Women's Political Caucus with their Exceptional Merit in Media award. She received an Honorable Mention from the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards in 2002.

Other writing Helen Borten continued writing into her eighties. In 2016, she told Publishers Weekly that she was working on a nonfiction book called Dark Victories: A Murder Case, the Terrorist Scare and Lies in the Name of Justice. She also described working on an unpublished memoir.

Personal life Helen Borten married shortly after finishing art school, and had two children before the marriage ended in divorce. She moved to New York City and raised her sons, Peter and Laurence, as a single mother.

Borten is a longtime resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she lived in the same apartment for more than 40 years. She has expressed a great love for her neighborhood, saying, "there is no such thing as a boring walk in this neighborhood. I enjoy the electricity and the street life and the diversity".