An experienced writer, columnist, public speaker and editor in chief, Michelle Cuthrell's first full-length book is Behind the Blue-Star Banner.

            She graduated from Ithaca College in 2004 with a degree in journalism and a penchant for the personal. After working for nearly a year as a part-time reporter at the Ithaca Journal, she soon found her heart in writing about her own life experiences. She moved with her husband to Fort Wainwright, Alaska, in January 2005. There, she immediately began composing bi-weekly travel columns about the Last Frontier for her hometown Ohio newspaper, The Vandalia Drummer News.

            When her husband deployed to Iraq in August 2005, she used the opportunity to switch her focus from travel to trials. She began working as a cameraperson and then a features reporter at the NBC affiliate television station in Fairbanks, KTVF Channel 11, where she reported, edited and presented feature stories involving the military community.

             Between October 2005 and December 2006, Michelle composed a weekly column titled “Until They Come Home” for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and the military newspaper The Alaska Post about her personal experiences as a military wife dealing with deployment on the home front.

             Letters to the editor of both papers called her columns “refreshing,” “honest” and “authentic.” One writer commented, “We need more Michelles during these hard times.”

            Throughout the deployment, Michelle was interviewed on and appeared in such media as the CBS Radio News, the Army Times and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, as well as various mothering and military Web sites. 

After her husband returned from Iraq in December 2006, Michelle compiled her columns, commentaries, speeches and experiences into a book, Behind the Blue-Star Banner: A Memoir from the Home Front, and in 2008, her publishing company proudly printed the memoir.  

Today, four combat deployments later, Michelle uses her book as an opportunity to address various military and civilian audiences about confronting the challenges of deployment on the home front and confronting them with joy. Since the release of her book, Michelle has appeared on Fox News Live, Army Wife Talk Radio, Seattle’s Spirit 105.3 FM, and on the pages of the Army Times, The Olympian and bestselling author Ellie Kay’s most recent edition of her popular book, Heroes at Home. Her articles and columns appear regularly in such military and family publications as Operation Home Front online magazine, the Army Times and Military Spouse Magazine.

            Michelle, her husband and their two beautiful boys currently reside in San Antonio, Texas, where Michelle serves as the editor in chief of Good Catch Publishing, and Matt continues to serve in the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston. 

* Author photograph by Michelle Ocampo.