Angela Townsend
Angela Townsend has been the Development Director at Tabby’s Place, a cat sanctuary, for over sixteen years. This was not the path she expected with a seminary degree, but love is a wry author of lives. She delights in bearing witness to mercy for all beings. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and expects epiphanies everywhere. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for thirty-three years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.
Angie has delighted in writing since she could first hold a crayon. She has been the lead writer of Tabby Place’s blog, Felis Catus, for nearly two decades, but it was only in 2023 that her tenacious mother prevailed upon her to begin submitting her writing for publication. Angie’s work appears or is forthcoming in over 160 literary journals, including Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Lake Effect, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, Pleiades, The Razor, and Terrain.org. She is a Writer’s Digest award winner and Best Spiritual Literature nominee.
Q: What is the first book you remember reading or having read to you as a child?
A: The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. My mother has been my best friend all my life, and this book wrapped me in the safety of her devotion.
Q: Do you have a favourite quote? (From a book, film, song, speech…)
A: ‘At last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love!’ —St. Thérèse of Lisieux
Q: What superpower would you like to have and why?
A: I would love nothing more than to be a healer of people and animals. Every living creature, however proud, is wounded, and I yearn to bring comfort.
Q: Who is your personal inspiration?
A: My mother, who I call ‘Mamalula’, inspires me continually. She is the reason it always came naturally for this little girl to believe in a loving God. She is love on two legs, and the most luminous writer I have ever known. As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.’
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