Rate My Professor Rebecca Balcárcel

Rebecca Balcárcel serves as Associate Professor of English at Tarrant County College Northeast Campus within the Tarrant County College District. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Bennington College's Writing Seminars in 2002. Balcárcel teaches creative writing courses at the institution, a class she herself took as a student earlier in her career. She received tenure from the college board in 2009. Her professional trajectory includes leading discussions on the art of writing poetry and serving as a judge for student writing contests at the Northeast Campus. In 2017, an article by Balcárcel appeared in Noticario, the newsletter of the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education. As a published author, she was invited to speak at the Fort Worth Boys and Girls Club’s Career Day.

Balcárcel is the author of two middle-grade novels published by Chronicle Books. Her debut, The Other Half of Happy, was released in 2019. The story centers on Quijana, a 12-year-old bi-cultural girl reflecting Balcárcel's own Guatemalan-Anglo American heritage, inspired by personal experiences such as visits from her Guatemalan grandparents and challenges with Spanish language. The narrative evolved from vignettes and poems into a full novel over several years. Her second book, Shine On, Luz Véliz!, followed in 2022. Balcárcel has contributed to Highlights magazine and published an essay about biking 1300 miles from Houston to Santa Fe while pregnant in the Oklahoma Review. A short story by her is forthcoming in Boundless, an anthology by multi-racial/multi-cultural authors. She maintains memberships in the Texas Institute of Letters, Las Musas Latina Author Collective, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and National Council of Teachers of English. Recently, she has facilitated student attendance at author events and introduced poetry readings on campus.