Betancourt grew up in Burlington, Vermont and Vermont, Illinois. She lived across from a dairy farm where she enjoyed, as she put it "'Helping in the barns and hanging out in the big farm kitchen with our Swedish neighbors". As a child she never considered being an author. She studied tap-dancing and wished to be a dancer when she grew up. She then moved to New York, where she finished school, began teaching, and got a degree in film from New York University. After teaching junior high and high school for a few years she wrote her first novel. Soon she became a full time author.
She now lives in either the top story of a sixteen-story building in New York, near the American Museum of Natural History, or in her home in Connecticut. She draws, paints, and reads in her free time. She never lost her love for dance
