La Mers was born Joyce Duncan in Billings, Montana in 1920, the third child and only daughter of a successful livestock dealer.
During World War II La Mers dropped out of Fresno State University, where she was pursuing a degree in journalism, and later married her boyfriend Tom Carlile.
She worked as a homemaker and mother to the couple's two children until their divorce 17 years later, and subsequently got a job as a secretary and then as a copy writer at an advertising firm.
Since then her poetry has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Light Quarterly, and several anthologies.
[3] La Mers, a great-grandmother and 40-year resident of Oxnard, California, continued to publish and give public readings of her poetry up until her death in 2013.