Rebecca Winters

Rebecca Brown was born on February 14, 1940 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is the daughter of Dr. John Zimmerman Brown, Jr. and Kathryn Ormsby Hyde. When she was 17, she went to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she learned to speak French and met girls from all over the world. Upon returning to the U.S., Rebecca developed her love of languages when she earned her B.A. in secondary education, history, French, and Spanish from the University of Utah and did postgraduate work in Arabic.

Because of her studies overseas, Rebecca decided to become a teacher and studied French and history at her alma mater in Utah. For the past 15 years, she's taught junior-high and high-school French and history, and says she got into serious writing almost by accident.

"I went through a back door to begin my writing career," she says. "In the first place, I never liked to write anything -- I only wrote mandatory papers for school. If anyone had told me I would become a writer, let alone love it, I would have laughed and dismissed the notion as absolutely absurd and preposterous. Having said that, I did write letters to my parents while I was away at boarding school when I was 17. My mother kept them and one day, after I had become a mother for the second time, she sent me all my old letters and asked me to write my memories from them for posterity. At the time I thought she was insane, but because I adore my mother I did as she asked.