Martine Robinson Beachboard has loved words from the time she first learned to use them. This occurred when, at the age of 2, she spent a week with her older brother in the hot, sticky backseat of a green Ford sedan as her parents drove the family from Washington, D.C. to Phoenix. She studied words enough to win a citywide spelling bee in seventh grade.

Next thing you know, she’s a newspaper editor in southeast Arizona. Her weekly column develops a loyal following, evoking a range of reader responses and emotions, and it begins to earn professional recognition.

Early in her journalism career, she learns that everyone has a story. Before long, she realizes that everyone is a story. Her writing is honored by the Arizona Press Club, Arizona Press Women and a Penney-Missouri Newspaper Awards competition.

She moves to Europe to manage public relations for The University of Maryland Global Campus headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, but she continues to write for the Sierra Vista Herald/Review, authoring anecdotes about life in an overseas military community.

Finally, she develops some of these stories into a book. Her first such effort, Misfits Abroad, was recently imprinted by Livingwell Publishing. Her creative writing balances the appeal of an unusual circumstance with the resonance of universal human experience. (Her academic work is nonfiction!)

Ms. Beachboard completed the Ph.D. with Touro College in Manhattan, New York, and was then an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Idaho State University. Having attained the Cambridge English Level 5 Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA), she now teaches English as a Second Language with Literacy Connects and is a child-literacy tutor in Tucson and the White Mountains.

She has lived or visited in forty countries. Recently, she served as a Fulbright Specialist with Kosovo Women’s Network in Pristina.