Rachel DeFriez
Website

No one would suspect that Rachel DeFriez, the mom next door, was secretly writing fantasy fiction in the room above the garage.  She drives four children around to sundry and numerous destinations in a crumb-encrusted, dusty white mini-van, teaches French at their charter school two days a week, volunteers at church and other charitable organizations, keeps a mother-in-law approved house, and plants flowers in the spring. 

But inside the neighborhood mom hides a small girl cocooned in thousands of pages of historical fiction, romance, fantasy, and magic. And sometimes, when the kids are in school, the laundry is folded, the bathrooms are clean, the floors are vacuumed, the dishes are washed, the bills are paid, the papers are graded, the lawn is mowed, and the phone is quiet; she sneaks away to her computer, takes out her everyday people—her husband as a boy (because he grew up in a small town in Utah), her daughters, old friends and family—and writes them a magical fantasy world of fairy tales all mixed up in real life. 

In third grade, Rachel wrote that she wanted to go to school and be really smart so that she could be a teacher and write a book.  She began her quest in school in Southern California, and then studied French and English at Brigham Young University.  She spent a semester abroad in Paris and then served a two-year mission for her church to the south of France. She married Curt DeFriez, a native of Utah, and taught French and English in a Salt Lake area high school until the first of her four children was born.  When the third went to school, and the fourth was old enough to watch PBS for an hour before her nap, Rachel took it into her head to write a story about a dream she’d had a few years earlier.  She now lives, and writes whenever she can, in Massachusetts with her husband and four inspiringly lovely children.