Karen Petersen

After Vassar, Karen was one of only a few women nationally to be writing about jazz and salsa in the major metropolitan market of New York City, publishing in Latin NY magazine and the Soho Weekly News. A chance meeting with a combat photojournalist from Mexico at a NYC party led her to leave behind what was the endless sexism of the music business for the camaraderie of overseas journalism, and she became a combat photojournalist--only one of five women in the world at that time.. During that decade, she was the first to report on the translocation of the endangered rhino in Zimbabwe for WCS, and in 1989 she was the first Western print journalist to go into the jungles of Myanmar and interview General Khun Sa, the King of the Opium Trade, a piece which ran in People magazine in June 1990.
After a series of injuries overseas, later in life she designed educational video games, one which taught physics to kids and the other which was the first cognitive rehab game for patients with traumatic brain injury. She is now focusing on a literary career which will stand as her final legacy.
In pursuit of that legacy, she has published poetry, short stories, and flash both nationally and internationally. Her poems have been translated into Persian and Spanish, and she has been nominated for numerous prizes, including ten Pushcarts, and most recently long-listed for the UK's international Bridport Prize, Forward Prize, and Australia's Peter Porter Prize. In 2022, her first chapbook "Trembling," published by Kelsay Books, won the Wil Mills Award, judged by Annie Finch, and her poem "The Price of Love" was nominated for Best of the Net. New work is in The Wallace Stevens Journal and The Cimarron Review. Her second chapbook, "Wamponomon: The Place of Shells" came out in 2024 and won the SW Design Award. Her third chapbook, "Influences: The 'Irish' Poems" came out in 2025 with a letter from President Biden enclosed. A major non-fiction book and several volumes of short stories is currently in progress. More information can be found at: https://karenpetersenwriter.com