Shaping Families

Rebecca Thatcher Murcia is an Akron, Pa. based author of 14 historical, biographical, sports, and scientific books for children and young adults. She has worked for various newspapers as an investigative journalist.

Rebecca was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and grew up in Garrison, New York. Her parents are Susan Thatcher, an occupational therapist, and Jim Thatcher, an expert on the use of computers by the visually impaired. She graduated from The University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1986 and went to work as a reporter at the Springfield Union-News. Wanting to improve her Spanish and become familiar with another culture, she moved to Brownsville, Texas in 1988. She worked at the Brownsville Herald as a health reporter, and then a federal agencies reporter, until 1993. She was well known for her tenacious investigations in Brownsville, once so angering a drug trafficker with her articles that he apparently mailed her an animal's tongue as a threat. In Brownsville, she met Saul Murcia, a native of Colombia who was working for the Mennonite Church in Brownsville. They were married in 1989. The couple moved to Austin in 1993, where their children, Gabriel and Mario were born. Thatcher Murcia worked at the Austin American-Statesman from 1993 to 2000.

In 2001, they moved in Akron, Penn., when Saul was named co-director for Latin America for the Mennonite Central Committee. Saul died of cancer in 2005, when Mario was eight and Gabriel was nine. In addition to her 14 books published by Mitchell Lane, Rebecca Thatcher has written essays for Topdrawersoccer.com, reviews for Criticas, and other articles and commentary.

http://www.thatchermurcia.com/ 
http://www.thatchermurcia.com/Biopage.html