Rebekah Harris is an aspiring teen fiction author.

Born and raised in rural East Tennessee, Rebekah Harris feels her life has been fraught with irony. The misfortune of being the runty kid from the south who doesn’t speak southern (due to her Yankee bred father) isn’t exactly a recipe for fitting in. Harris recalls that her childhood was plagued with questions like “why do you talk funny?”, “where are you from?”, and “you’re from the north, aren’t you?”  As if her accent didn’t make her a big enough outcast, in middle school, she was plagued by braces, glasses and freckles all at the same time, not to mention being a rough and tumble tom boy. In high school, her role as a pariah continued, as she preferred baggy pants, black Tees and Chucks to low cut, skin-tight shirts and low rider jeans. And to top it all off, she was a church-goer with parents who had been married to each other her entire life (and still are, thirty-nine years and counting). Needless to say, she wasn’t exactly the epitome of the all-American high school student.

Harris’ high school years were spent in the sanctuary of her room or the rooms of her closest friends, where she dreamed up word combinations used in poetry and characters cast in short stories. After graduating from high school in 2000, most of her classmates went off to school to become nurses and attorneys or computer geniuses, while Harris was off to Emory & Henry College in Virginia to major in Creative Writing and minor in Mass Communications. In only three years, she graduated with a degree in English and accepted a job at a newspaper in the mountains of East Tennessee.

Working at The Erwin Record, in the tiny town of Erwin may not seem like much to boast about at first. However, the publication has been voted the state’s best weekly paper by the Tennessee Press Association time and again. As the only full-time reporter, Harris had the opportunity to hone and perfect her writing skills-which led her to earn several awards from the Tennessee Press Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.

After two years as a reporter, Harris ironically made the decision to become a high school English teacher and earned her Masters degree in Education from Milligan College in 2006. Though life was sometimes rough for the average teacher in a public high school, Harris enjoyed sharing her love of writing and literature with her students and still isn’t afraid to admit that she sometimes learned more from the seventeen year-olds she taught than they learned from her. Harris taught  junior level English and journalism for five years at Hampton High School in Hampton, Tennessee, and served as the faculty sponsor for the school publication, The Bulldog Bark.

Harris currently teaches Composition, Business Writing, Written Communications, and Oral Communications at a local college. She resides in Piney Flats, Tennessee, with her grouchy calico cat, Hazel, and her husband Kevin, who works as a database manager and web developer.