Rachel LaBranche

Rachel is a writer, first and foremost. She started dabbling in writing fantasy novels when she was nine years old, and she's never looked back. Right now, most of her novels fall into the fantasy and/or science fiction genre, but she harbors a desire to write a book in every genre she can manage. (See her blog for more details.) If you want to read something of hers, hop on over here: Holyoak Five - an ongoing story about five girls attending a college in New England for witchcraft.

Her academic education at Clark University was in biology - specifically ecology, evolution, and conservation. For two summers, she worked for the Foster-Baker threespine stickleback lab doing field work in south-central Alaska. She helped start and maintain the Stickleblog, an ongoing account of the lab's field research. Stickleback Blog

She also worked as a contractor to the USDA surveying trees in Worcester, MA for presence of the invasive Asian Long-Horned Beetle for two years after she graduated.

As the oldest child of an Army officer. she was born in Germany and has lived all over the United States). Traveling so much has shaped the way she sees the world and instilled permanent wanderlust. These days she lives western Massachusetts with her science teacher boyfriend and two cats of questionable intelligence.