Rachael Phillips

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.