Karen Kao, Member At International Writers' Collective

Karen Kao

Since 2011, Karen, a former attorney, has had the good fortune to write full-time from her home in Amsterdam. "I work all day with the characters I’ve created and learned to love. If I get lucky, they sit up and tell me their stories. I work with language – no longer to convince or badger or corner – but to paint a picture." Karen is the winner of the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, VERA, and Best of the Net. Her debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle (Linen Press 2017) is the first of a quartet of historical novels set in Shanghai. Karen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, The Common, and The Shanghai Literary Review, among others. With authors Lan Samantha Chang and Yiyun Li and the University of British Columbia, Karen has studied novel-writing. Karen is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop where she studied creative nonfiction with Dinty W. Moore. You can read more about Karen and her work on her website.

What Karen's students say

I very much enjoyed Karen’s style of teaching. She was really approachable, very quick in sending out and replying to emails and in sharing information. I believe she has a raft of experience to share with prospective writers.

Ashleigh
Student
Karen has a calm, but authoritative energy. I trusted that when she said something it was well thought out, and helpful. In a few, well chosen words she manages to get a point across which will have me considering editing options for days to come.

Kristen
Student
Karen was a really great head for the workshop. I could tell that she put a lot of care into her feedback and that she really started to get a sense of who we were all specifically as writers.

Tara
Student
Karen was great. She gave very useful information that was really personalised and I felt she took us seriously. I appreciated her calm, thorough explanations.

Marielle
Student
I think that Karen is marvelous. She is straightforward and honest and earnest.

Kathleen C.
Student