Rachel is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she fell in love with words and started her cowboy boot collection. In high school, she wrote for her school's newspaper, eventually becoming the editor during her senior year. She moved to California in 2009 to attend Stanford. At Stanford, she wrote for the student newspaper and took writing classes, and she realized that she should probably never leave California. In 2017, she returned to school to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside Palm Desert. She studied fiction and contributed to the program's literary journal, The Coachella Review. She still lives in California today and is probably never leaving.