Rachel Beth Cunning earned her B.A. and her M.S.Ed. from the University of Kansas where she studied Creative Writing, Latin, and Education. She is a Latin, ESL, and English teacher who has taught a variety of age ranges, from toddlers to university students. She has also developed literacy assessments in English, including reading and writing, for students in grades 3-10.
Ms. Rachel Cunning has presented on the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension at the American Classical League Institute in Missoula. She also presented on cultivating an inclusive classroom at the American Association of Teachers of Italian Conference. In addition, she will present about using stories to promote diversity and building community through reading at the American Classical League’s Virtual Institute in 2021. She strives to promote both literacy and inclusivity in her classroom. Outside of her publications in Latin and her contributions to Keeping Backyard Bees, Ms. Cunning has also written for Court Review, Teaching Tolerance and Community Chickens.
Ms. Cunning’s goal as a novella writer is to produce a compelling story that makes accessible those stories that so inspired the ancient Roman world. She hopes that readers will have the experience of reading an exciting story that is culturally rooted and of genuinely reading Latin without needing to translate it. Most importantly, she hopes that readers will want to read the rest of the story to find out what happens in it. In other words, she hopes that readers will feel that same compulsion all readers have felt when they become engrossed in a good story.
When she is not reading or writing, she often sews, quilts, knits, spins, gardens, operates a chainsaw, and plans her next outdoor backpacking adventure. She is intermittently entirely unreachable when she disappears into the backcountry where she always brings her Kindle and a notebook. She lives in Colorado with her two obnoxiously loveable cats, Trouble and Mischief.
