Rachel Rivera Author
Writer. Reader. Dreamer.
finding magic in the mundane and dreaming up stories
Biography
Rachel Rivera is a vocalist, sound healer, preschool and elementary general music teacher, and writer located in Southern Maine. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a BM in opera performance. Her main focus in writing is children's, middle-grade, and young adult fiction. A lover of wildlife and the outdoors, Rachel takes inspiration from the world's natural beauty to write her stories. She loves fantasy and incorporates magic in everything she writes, using fallen trees as portals to other worlds. When she is not writing, Rachel can be found reading, singing, tending to her many plants, and walking with her dogs. Rachel Rivera lives in southern Maine and grew up exploring the many parks there.
My Story
My name is Rachel Rivera, and I am a young adult, middle-grade, and children’s author. I have an MFA in creative writing from Southern New Hampshire University and a bachelor's degree in opera performance from the University of Southern Maine. Along with writing, I love singing, horseback riding, and teaching. I’m a sound and Reiki healer, and a preschool and elementary general music teacher. From the age of ten, I knew I wanted to be a singer and writer, and I am so grateful that my childhood dreams came true. My focus in writing is fiction, mainly fantasy and sci-fi, but I do occasionally enjoy journaling and writing silly stories about my own life.
Growing up and living in Maine, I have always been inspired by the outdoors and am grateful for having a childhood filled with imagination-based play in the woods. Those childhood games are what sparked my interest in writing stories. Throughout grade school, I always loved writing, and in middle and high school, I would spend hours coming up with stories and sharing them with my family, friends, and English teachers. Many of my stories came from dreams I had or games I made up as a child. These both still inspire many of my stories today!
In my freshman year of college, the first English professor I had saw my skill and love of writing and approached me with a suggestion: why don’t you do a double major in English and Opera? I thought long and hard, but I wanted to finish my degree in four years, not five or six, so I decided against that idea. He also suggested I do an honors-level study focusing on writing, which I did not do because I transferred from that school. To this day, I am forever grateful to that professor and how he saw something in me, even when I was pulling away from writing.
After that, it took me five years to realize that writing was something I wanted to pursue, all thanks to the lockdown (the lockdown changed many facets of my life all at once, mostly career-related). So I applied to a master’s degree program in English and creative writing at SNHU. About a year and a half into that program, I decided that the MFA made more sense, which prompted me to switch programs. While in the program at SNHU, I worked on a few short stories, finished an early chapter book that I hope to publish, and wrote my first full-length novel, THE KEEPERS OF THE FORESTS, which I am currently querying.
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If you can dream it, you can do it, and never give up on your dreams!
Contact
I'm always looking for new and exciting opportunities. Let's connect.