Betsy Mars is a lifelong poet, writing her first poem in Portuguese – an elegy for her cat – while her family lived in Brazil. She didn’t return to poetry in earnest for approximately 50 years and is urgently trying to make up for lost time. She works in the field of education, piecing together a living. She is also a photographer and has had photos featured in RATTLE and Praxis, among others. She founded Kingly Street Press in 2019, publishing her first anthology, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife, in October. Her work has appeared widely online in such places as Kissing Dynamite, The Blue Nib, The Ekphrastic Review, Panoplyzine, and The Poetry Super Highway, as well as in multiple anthologies. Her first chapbook, Alinea (Picture Show Press), came out in January 2019. She was recently selected as one of the winners of the Alexandria Quarterly First Line Poetry Contest Series. She is currently in the final stages of putting together In the Muddle of the Night, a chapbook she is co-authoring with poet Alan Walowitz. She lives in the coastal suburbs of Los Angeles where she occupies herself with animal maintenance and fur collection.
© Betsy Mars