Helen Werner Cox

Helen Werner Cox was trained as a classical painter and visual arts educator at Boston University’s prestigious School of Fine Arts. She taught secondary art in several different environments, public and private, before taking on program management at the Neighborhood Arts Center in Boston’s South End. Through these experiences, she developed her second great passion in life—the affirmation of multiculturalism and access to quality education for underserved communities. This led to an interest in literacy which she explored while obtaining her M.Ed. at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Helen relocated to Long Beach, California in 1988, where she taught art at Lindbergh Middle School in a low-income neighborhood for three years. Upon the retirement of the school librarian, Helen stepped into the role with a proposal to promote literacy through the library. Working with a mission to provide the highest quality programs and materials anywhere, she transformed the Lindbergh library into a magical “Reading Room,” which won the School Library Journal’s and Gale Publishing Company’s 2002 Giant Step Award for the nation’s most improved media center. After obtaining her national credential as a Library Media Teacher, she spent the last four years of her teaching career transforming yet another underserved library at Hamilton Middle School into a center for literacy, art, and multiculturalism. Following her retirement from teaching in 2010, Helen decided to actualize her passion and talents as an artist. She graduated with an MFA from the College of the Arts at California State University Long Beach in May, 2016.