About Julie Phend

Julie Phend was born and raised in Wausau, Wisconsin, the oldest of five children. Her earliest memories involve books and writing. As early as fifth grade, she was creating “chapter a week” mystery stories starring her friends and a school that closely resembled her own. “I had some wonderful English teachers in junior high and high school,” she recalls. One high school teacher in particular encouraged Julie to enter contests, and when she was a senior in high school, she won a Promising Young Writers award from the National Council of Teachers of English. In high school, she also discovered a love for theater and participated in school plays as well as the school newspaper and literary magazine.

She attended college at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, where she double- majored in English and Drama. Her junior year was particularly memorable, as she joined nine other drama majors in Coventry, England to study the relationship of drama and the church at Coventry Cathedral. “It was wonderful,” she relates. “We wrote all our own scripts—many of them about prominent social issues of the time—and toured around the countryside presenting our shows at schools and churches.” When she returned to Valparaiso her senior year, she became involved in directing a children’s theater program. “I took the skills I had learned in Coventry and applied them with the children. We wrote and produced all our own plays.” That experience prompted her to seek an advanced degree in education, and she earned an MS in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin. Since then, she has taught English and drama in various settings, including schools in Bristol and Roanoke, Virginia, and in Naperville, Illinois. She also served as Director of Noncredit Programs at North Central College, and wrote a book called Programs for Children, published by LERN Publications. For the past seventeen years, she taught eighth grade language arts at Lincoln Junior High in Naperville, where she wrote and directed eight original plays. She met Stanley Edwards when he came to talk to her students about WWII, and collaborated with him on D-Day and Beyond: A True Story of Escape and POW Survival.

Julie recently retired from teaching and is looking forward to doing more writing, reading, speaking, and learning.