Karen Auvinen is an award-winning poet, mountain woman, life-long westerner, writer, educator, speaker, and the author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (Scribner).

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, Real Simple, Westword, and The Rumpus, as well as numerous literary journals. A collection of short stories is forthcoming. She is working on a novel.

Karen is the founder of Writing Wild Workshops and is on the Graduate Faculty in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and also teaches writing workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and for Fishtrap Writing the West in addition to teaching film, pop culture, and storytelling to first-years at the CU – Boulder.

Karen lives in the Colorado mountains with the artist Greg Marquez, their dog River, and Dottie the Cat.