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, Tahoma Literary Review, an Asian short story anthology A Tapestry of Colours, The Common, 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. For creative nonfiction, Karen has worked or will work with Joanna Penn Cooper and Dinty W. Moore.

You can read more about Karen and her work on her website.