Karen Auvinen is poet, mountain woman, outlier, life-long westerner, writer, and the author of the memoir and COLORADO BOOK AWARD FINALIST ROUGH BEAUTY: FORTY SEASONS OF MOUNTAIN LIVING, chosen by The Christian Science Monitor as a top 10 Book of June (2018).

Karen's writing traverses the intersection of landscape and place, and examines what it means to live deeply and voluptuously, and has appeared in The New York Times, Terrain.org, Real Simple, Westword, LitHub, The Rumpus, and numerous literary journals. Awards include two Pushcart Prize nominations, a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Imagination Award, two Academy of American Poets Awards, and two Jentel residencies. Karen is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Nederland, Colorado

Karen earned an MA in poetry from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D in fiction from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and presently teaches film, popular culture, and storytelling to freshman at the University of Colorado – Boulder and is on the Nature Writing Faculty in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Western Colorado University.

Past gigs include Writer-in-Residence for the State of Colorado, editor, book-buyer, rural postal route driver, caterer, clinic assistant, landscaper, summer camp director, and guest chef. She lives in the mountains of Colorado with the artist Greg Marquez (www.artquez.com), their dog Yuki. .

For weekly meditations on All Things Wild, join Karen's Substack @AWomansPlaceIsIntheWild : www.karenauvinen@substack.com