Rebecca Kightlinger grew up in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a Steelworker who would become a union leader, and a secretary who would become a district justice.
From the age of four, Rebecca wanted to become a doctor, and at thirty she completed medical school in Philadelphia. She served her OB/GYN residency in St. Louis and practiced obstetrics and gynecology for nearly twenty years, both in her hometown and on the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville.
While at UVA, she was privileged to work alongside some of the country's leading specialists in women's health. She was also privileged to serve with Remote Area Medical volunteer corps, working alongside RAM founder Stan Brock and scores of other volunteers to assist Guyana's Ministry of Health in developing a cervical cancer screening and treatment program for the Amerindian women in Guyana's most remote villages.
In 2010, when a serious hand injury abruptly ended her ability to practice medicine, she had to create a new life. Living once more in Pennsylvania with her husband and pets, she turned to writing, which she had enjoyed as a clinician, teacher, and researcher. But now, no longer part of the world of medicine, she turned to writing fiction: long, short, and flash. In order to turn what had been an interest and an avocation into a new profession, she returned to school, studying fiction writing at the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA program and earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. She capped this off with a two-year certificate program in editing through the University of California at San Diego.
Her first novel, Megge of Bury Down, published in 2018 by Zumaya, opens The Bury Down Chronicles, a family saga of the fictional healers and seers of thirteenth-century Bury Down, Cornwall. Intense research and a site visit to Bury Down in 2013 proved invaluable to developing the story and its setting.
Rebecca returned to Cornwall in 2018 to revisit Bury Down and to find the cliff cave in Cornwall's northern coast where the next part of Megge's remarkable life takes place.
Book Two of The Bury Down Chronicles, in progress for over three years, is now nearing completion.
Rebecca Kightlinger grew up in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a Steelworker who would become a union leader, and a secretary who would become a district justice.
From the age of four, Rebecca wanted to become a doctor, and at thirty she completed medical school in Philadelphia. She served her OB/GYN residency in St. Louis and practiced obstetrics and gynecology for nearly twenty years, both in her hometown and on the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville.
While at UVA, she was privileged to work alongside some of the country's leading specialists in women's health. She was also privileged to serve with Remote Area Medical volunteer corps, working alongside RAM founder Stan Brock and scores of other volunteers to assist Guyana's Ministry of Health in developing a cervical cancer screening and treatment program for the Amerindian women in Guyana's most remote villages.
In 2010, when a serious hand injury abruptly ended her ability to practice medicine, she had to create a new life. Living once more in Pennsylvania with her husband and pets, she turned to writing, which she had enjoyed as a clinician, teacher, and researcher. But now, no longer part of the world of medicine, she turned to writing fiction: long, short, and flash. In order to turn what had been an interest and an avocation into a new profession, she returned to school, studying fiction writing at the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA program and earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. She capped this off with a two-year certificate program in editing through the University of California at San Diego.
Her first novel, Megge of Bury Down, published in 2018 by Zumaya, opens The Bury Down Chronicles, a family saga of the fictional healers and seers of thirteenth-century Bury Down, Cornwall. Intense research and a site visit to Bury Down in 2013 proved invaluable to developing the story and its setting.
Rebecca returned to Cornwall in 2018 to revisit Bury Down and to find the cliff cave in Cornwall's northern coast where the next part of Megge's remarkable life takes place.
Book Two of The Bury Down Chronicles, in progress for over three years, is now nearing completion.