Rebecca Daniels, Author

Rebecca Daniels (MFA, PhD) taught performance, writing, and speaking in liberal arts universities for over 25 years, including St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, from 1992-2015. She was the founding producing director of Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR, and directed with many professional Portland theatre companies in the 1980s.

She is the author of the groundbreaking Women Stage Directors Speak: Exploring the Effects of Gender on Their Work (McFarland, 1996, 2000) and has been published in multiple professional theatre journals. After her retirement from teaching, she began her association with Sunbury Press with Keeping the Lights on for Ike: Daily Life of a Utilities Engineer at AFHQ in Europe During WWII; or, What to Say in Letters Home When You’re Not Allowed to Write about the War (2019), a book based on her father’s letter home from Europe during WWII. 

She had always known she was adopted, but it was only as retirement approached, and with a friend’s encouragement, that she began the search for her genetic heritage through DNA testing. Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find her Birth Family (Sunbury Press, September 2021) explores how DNA testing, combined with traditional genealogical research, helped her find her genetic parents, two half-sisters (one maternal; one paternal), and other relatives despite being given up for a closed adoption at birth.

Most recently, she completed a new memoir about her late-in-life second marriage and sudden widowhood called That Day And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years (Sunbury Press, June 2024).

To book Rebecca for an author talk at your venue, you can email her at rdaniels@stlawu.edu.


Books by Rebecca Daniels

That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels
Finding Sisters by Rebecca Daniels
Keeping the Lights On for Ike by Rebecca Daniels
Women Stage Directors Speak by Rebecca Daniels