Karen Russell

North Words 2023 keynote author, Karen Russell, born and raised in Miami, FL, won the 2012 and 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of the Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. Russell is also the author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories, Sleep Donation: A Novella, and most recently, Orange World. She currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State University’s MFA program, and lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.

Photo by Michael Lionstar, courtesy PRH