Rachael Phillips, once a church choir director,
owes her unplanned writing career to an omnipotent church secretary who laid down
the law: each staff member had to contribute a monthly article to the newsletter.
Others considered this dictate a punishment from God. But Rachael enjoying writing,
and soon she was contributing columns to a local newspaper.
Rachael has been nominated as a finalist
in the American Christian Fiction Writers
Carol Awards competition with her first fiction, a novella called Ride with Me into
Christmas (in A Door County Christmas, Barbour Publishing, 2010). Her second novella,
Pirate of my Heart (in A Quaker Christmas, Barbour) will appear in September 2011,
and a third, In Tune with You (in Cedar Creek Seasons, Barbour) will be released the
spring of 2012. She also co-authored a Barbour reference book, Women of the Bible (2011).
Rachael won the 2004 Erma Bombeck Global
Humor Award. The same year the Evangelical
Press Association awarded her third place in humor for "It's the Little Things that
Count" (Marriage Partnership, 2003). She has contributed humor articles to Kyria,
Today's Christian Woman, Marriage Partnership, ACFW's Afictionado, and others.
She writes a weekly humor column for the Plymouth, Indiana Pilot News, Marion,
Indiana Chronicle-Tribune, and Marion, Illinois Review called "Coffee Corner,"
the theme of her Web site. Rachael has accumulated more than three hundred fifty
column and news bylines.
A summa cum laude graduate of Bethel
College (Mishawaka, Indiana), Rachael
served as an adjunct writing professor there from 2005-2009.
Rachael is active in the music ministry
and women's ministries of her church,
Upland Community Church. She and her husband Steve, a small-town physician and adjunct
professor at Taylor University (Upland, Indiana), have been married thirty-six years.
They have three grown children and five perfect grandchildren. Rachael and Steve
enjoy watching sports, talking theology, and riding their tandem bicycle throughout
the picturesque Indiana countryside.