Betsy Amster

Betsy Amster is president of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises, a literary agency in Portland.  Before opening her agency in 1992, she spent ten years as an editor at Pantheon and Vintage. She has been described in the L.A. Times as “a dogged prospector of…literary talent” and celebrated in a profile in the American Society of Journalists and Authors newsletter for her “no-nonsense style and whimsical sense of humor.”  Her clients include MacArthur fellow and urban farmer Will Allen, author of The Good Food Revolution (forthcoming from Gotham); psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of the New York Times bestseller The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and The Blessing of a B Minus (Scribner); María Amparo Escandón, author of the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Esperanza’s Box of Saints (Scribner) and Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co. (Crown); Margaret Leslie Davis, author of Mona Lisa in Camelot: How Jacqueline Kennedy and DaVinci’s Masterpiece Charmed and Captivated a Nation (Da Capo; excerpted in Vanity Fair); and many other novelists, journalists, and experts.

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