Amber Rookstool

Amber Rookstool discovered a passion for writing at the ripe age of eight years old. She remembers finishing a math test in first grade and being allowed to color. She wrote a three sentence story and illustrated a scene of a jungle. She went home that day and told her parents she wanted to be a writer.

Over the last eighteen years, Amber has been refining her voice and craft. She enjoys writing literary essays, short fiction, and poetry. Her essays have been nominated for the Jack Higgs Award in 2017 and 2018. She has presented her essays at the Southern Appalachian Student Conference of Literature at East Tennessee State University (2018) and King University in Bristol, Tennessee (2019), and at the Boland Undergraduate Research Symposium at East Tennessee State University (2019). Her essay, "Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory," won the Undergraduate Essay competition at SASCL in 2018. Amber's poetry has also been published and nominated for awards. Amber published seven poems in the Mockingbird in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Her poem, "Once Upon a Time a Girl Believed in Magic," earned third place in the 2020 Mockingbird Poetry Competition.

Since 2020, Amber has been focusing on her career as an educator for middle and high school French, English, and World Religions and Culture. She has written numerous lesson plans, built materials for classes, and prepared a text set to be used in an interdisciplinary curriculum. While she has enjoyed her career in education, she misses spending hours reading and researching, writing and editing, and finally presenting her discoveries. Amber enjoys studying academic topics related to conceptual metaphor theory, origin of fairy tales, literary translation, and French literature. Amber's dream career is to travel the world studying various cultures and literatures, researching, writing, and presenting content to promote open-mindedness, support cultural diversity, and encourage global citizenship.

Victor Hugo