who got her playwriting start as a child in Whittier, CA, where she wrote and produced her first plays on a picnic table stage. She acted throughout high school and college and minored in drama at BYU and, if she’d said yes, would today be a high school drama teacher in Southern CA. Instead she earned an M.A. in creative writing from BYU and a Ph.D. in 20th-century British and Irish literature from UCLA. An English professor at Weber State University, she teaches literature and creative writing. She travels regularly to North Friesland, a place whose “beauty won’t leave her be.” No surprise, really, that she should set two plays along that haunting coastline.
Karen’s poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction, notably the memoir that shapeshifted into her play Watermarked, have won multiple awards, and her literary criticism includes a book on Seamus Heaney and an article on Brian Friel’s play Molly Sweeney.
Favorite acting roles include Abigail in The Crucible, Myra in Hay Fever, Mrs. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth, and Olivia in Night Must Fall. She also read the lead in a workshop production of Watermarked, directed translated scenes for a staged reading in Germany, and received two Lindquist Creative Fellowships to research the memoir and play. The two-act play A Ferryman’s Daughter is her latest creative work.
Karen on the island of Sylt, North Friesland