Betsy Boyd is a fiction writer, professor, and mom of twin (tween) boys. Interests: widowhood, the endless variety of diet ice creams, the jobs people work and how those jobs may change, what it’s like to be a child in 2026, what it's like to be 93 right now, spiritualism, the shadow self, FST, visual art, rock climbing, running, flash fiction, long fiction, cat psychology, gossip, ethics, thrifting, houseplants.  Betsy has worked jobs as a magazine writer and editor, t-shirt painter, product namer, and sketch comedian. A native Texan, she writes about people she has met and those she would like to meet, the hard realities and lingering beauty of the American South and the challenges therein, the problem of having a human body, as well as all the things that strike her as funny/sad on a daily basis. Her short fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Five Points, StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize. Betsy directs the Creative Writing & Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore where she is student advisor for the school's longstanding literary journal, Welter. She is the recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her novel in progress, Heavenly Bodies, looks at society’s relentless fixation on thinness through the lens of the high-stakes reality show of the same name during a season in which the several female contestants are plagued by a diverse range of eating disorders and other taboo body problems that not even diet ice cream can ease.