Award-Winning Writer

Betsy Storm is a lifelong writer and an award-winning communicator. A longtime Chicagoan, she began writing at age 10 after learning to type on her father’s Olivetti typewriter. An award-winning newspaper reporter, he was her inspiration for writing.

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In 2007, Betsy founded Top Drawer Communications, a Chicago-based editorial services and public relations firm. Previously, she spent more than 20 years as a writer/editor and public relations professional for a range of organizations, including Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Betsy began her editorial pursuits in her hometown of Philadelphia and later moved to New York City to continue her writing career as managing editor of a magazine for the advertising industry.

Her professional honors include awards from the Public Relations Society of America, the Publicity Club of Chicago, and the Illinois Women’s Press Association. Betsy’s work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Consumers Digest, Brides, and many other publications. She holds a B.A. in Communications from American University in Washington, D.C. Betsy is a former vice president of Independent Writers of Chicago, the largest organization of professional independent writers in the Midwest.

The author of Bright Lights of the Second City: 50 Prominent Chicagoans on Living with Passion and Purpose (2014), a collection of profiles of 50 stellar Chicagoans, Betsy is forever fascinated with what makes people tick. What’s the real story behind the people, places, and events that shape their lives? She continues to explore these fascinating questions with the individuals and families she is privileged to meet while researching and writing family histories, biographies, and more in her work as a family memoirist.

Betsy lives in Evanston, Illinois (a place she absolutely loves).  The mother of an adult daughter and son, she is also the stepmother of two adult daughters and the grandmother of two teenage boys. Betsy is a longtime volunteer in the areas of anti-violence, hunger and poverty, literacy, community mental health, and the Girl Scouts of America.