After years of teaching, travel, Steve Rand shares a deeply personal story in his first book

July 3, 2026 | By Lisa Scagliotti 

Two years after stepping down from teaching high school English and painstakingly shepherding Harwood’s student travel study program to Rwanda and elsewhere, Steve Rand is sharing his first project as an author. 

Remarkably, this latest adventure required no faraway travels. Instead, it meant journeying back in time to his childhood and adolescence to unearth his own memories, stitch them together with recollections from family members and family friends, and create both a multi-dimensional portrait of and tribute to his mother.   

Book cover image courtesy of Onion River Press

The result is his first book, “A Mother's Prayer,” published in May by Onion River Press. Part memoir, part biography, the story Rand tells is a deeply personal recollection of his mother’s life from her middle child’s perspective. Through numerous vignettes of daily life, Rand introduces his mother as a main character of his own life whose death at age 39 came far too early. 

The loss of his mother, Anne Rand, followed her 13-year battle with melanoma and its progression and treatments were part of her family’s routine while she diligently worked to keep everyday life on track. Rand reaches back through his memories, recalling the time before his father left his wife and three young children, filling in his personal timeline as he became a teenager. 

In telling this deeply personal, family story, Rand shares the painful narrative of witnessing his parents’ marriage end, his father leaving their home in western New York to move to California with another woman. He recounts numerous detailed episodes of growing up in the 1980s, a confusing time for his childhood self to grasp what was happening both for his family as a whole and for his mother, who would disappear for periods to undergo surgeries and cancer treatments. 

A single mother for the last four years of her life, Anne Rand worked several low-paying jobs supporting her children, leaning on her Catholic faith and her family as her cancer spread. She also managed to surround herself with a cadre of loyal, supportive women friends, who gave her creative outlets and unconditional camaraderie. Despite the turmoil of coping with the loss of her marriage and the growing toll her illness was taking on her life, Anne Rand gave her children an enduring example of a parent’s devotion, patience and faith. 

Looking back now as an adult at the challenges his mother faced, Rand acknowledges the sadness she confronted as she mourned the loss of her partner and her attractiveness. He also celebrates her bravery, recounting his mother wearing a bikini at public swimming pools, unapologetically revealing her scars.

Following his mother’s death in 1984, Rand went on to graduate high school and join the U.S. Navy, where he worked as a photographer during three deployments to the Persian Gulf. Eventually, he returned to his parents’ home state of Vermont, where he attended UVM studying English, history and education. He then joined the faculty at Harwood Union High School, teaching English for 25 years and launching the school’s now well-established travel study program to Rwanda and other foreign countries. He retired in 2024. 

Along the way, Rand got his Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College. It was at Dartmouth that Rand said one of his writing professors challenged him to dive into telling his mother’s story. 

“She’d always been this friendly ghost,” Rand shared, describing an ever-present influence through his adult life. The prompt turned into his thesis, which evolved further into “A Mother’s Prayer.” 

Rand said he approached the project on multiple levels – mining his own memories first and later turning to his mother’s relatives and friends for their recollections to fill in details he would not have absorbed as a child. He relied on an ethnographic approach similar to the documentary exercises the high school students in the Harwood Rwanda travel study program would practice with guidance from the professionals from Vermont Folklife. 

The book’s narrative becomes rooted in the many moments of those formative years, illuminated with the collected details, and shared in the voice of the now-adult narrator. The story peels back the years, inviting the reader to revisit moments like a childhood visit to Disney World or a day at a high school football practice. It also unflinchingly reflects from Rand’s adult point of view today, acknowledging how Anne Rand simultaneously sacrificed, suffered and showed up until her time ran out at a heartbreakingly young age.  

Rand, who lives in Waterbury, visits his neighborhood bookstore, Bridgeside Books, on Tuesday, July 7, at 5:30 p.m. for a reading and discussion of “A Mother’s Prayer.” Tickets ($26.99) include a signed copy of the book. 

He also will be at Bear Pond Books in Stowe on Aug. 1 and hopes to schedule more dates to discuss the book. 

Visit Rand’s website and blog at steverand.org, where he also shares a musical playlist to accompany the book with tracks from Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday to Tracy Chapman, Van Morrison, U2, Pearl Jam, and Grace Potter.