Karen Russell

About Karen

Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, as well as winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award and the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list. 

Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, Tin House, and The New York Review of Books, and anthologized in The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Short Stories series. With composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone and choreographer and director Troy Schumacher, she co-created BalletCollective’s genre-straddling work, The Night Falls, one of the New York Times’ Best Dance Performances of 2023. Her story “Proving Up” was adapted into a critically acclaimed opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, with whom she is collaborating on an original opera, premiering in 2025.

She has taught literature and creative writing as a visiting professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College. She hs also served as the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she now lives in Portland, OR with her husband and two kids.

Her new novel, The Antidote, is forthcoming from Knopf in the spring of 2025.