Rachael
Phillips began her unplanned writing career contributing columns to her
church newsletter. Positive responses from her congregation motivated
her to attend a writing seminar at Bethel College, Mishawaka, Indiana,
where instructors encouraged writers to submit their work to
publishers. Rachael sent a humor column to the Hometown editor of the
South Bend Tribune, who requested more. He also asked her to cover
local news events. For five years, Rachael wrote for the Tribune,
accumulating more than a hundred bylines.
Rachael also began classes at Bethel College in
January 1998. She earned an associate degree in professional writing in December
2001 and her bachelor of arts in English at Bethel in May 2005.
Rachael keeps busy writing in the
second-story many-windowed office she has dubbed the "Tree House," a fulfillment
of her childhood fantasy. She has published humorous magazine articles in
Virtue, Today’s Christian Woman and Marriage Partnership. “It’s the Little
Things that Count” (Marriage Partnership, Fall 2003) took third place in the
Evangelical Press Association’s competition in 2004. She also won the 2004 Erma
Bombeck Global Humor Award with her essay “Dam It All, Anyway” in a contest
sponsored by the Washington-Centerville Library in conjunction with the
University of Dayton, where Erma attended. Her novel Song of the
Orphan Train
won first
palce in the Young Adult category of the 2007
ACFW Genesis Contest for unpublished fiction.
She writes a
weekly newspaper humor column, "Coffee Corner" that keeps readers laughing with
her unique perspective on daily life. Three of her humorous stories are in
the recent collection by Zondervan,
Help, I Can't Stop Laughing!
Rachael has authored four
biographies in Barbour Publishing’s Heroes of the Faith series:
Frederick Douglass: Abolitionist and Reformer; Billy Sunday:
Evangelist on the Sawdust Trail; St. Augustine: Early Church Father; and
Well with My Soul
, a collection of four mini-biographies of hymn writers.
An inspirational speaker and humorist, Rachael enjoys sharing with
small and large groups of diverse backgrounds and interests. She
teaches women’s Bible studies and a college-aged Sunday
school
class, as well as leading worship and performing solos.
Married
to Steve, a family physician, and the mother of Beth, 28, Christy,
25, and David, 22, she especially enjoys her granddaughter, Annabelle,
and grandson, Joey. Her hobbies include hand-holding walks
with her husband, riding their tandem bicycle, reading and singing.