Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2011, was the winner of the NYPL Young Lions prize, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Russell has been featured in  The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2009, she received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation. In 2013 she was named a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2012 and 2018 winner of the National Magazine Award for the Fiction category, and a 2013 finalist for the Feature Writing category. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American series, optioned for film and television, and adapted for the stage. Her latest book, Orange World, is a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases Karen Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. In February 2023, The Night Falls, an evening length work of dance theater developed by librettist and lyricist Karen Russell, the composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and the choreographer Troy Schumacher, will premiere at Peak Performances.

A captivating speaker, Karen Russell has spoken at libraries, universities, lecture series, and conferences around the country. She has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Bryn Mawr College, Williams College, and served as the Endowed Chair of the Texas State MFA program from 2017-2020. She is the recipient of a New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship and the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and was awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

Karen Russell is also the author of the celebrated short story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and the illustrated novella Sleep Donation, published by Vintage in 2020. Russell graduated summa cum laude from Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University in 2003, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2006. She was born and raised in Miami, Florida and now lives with her husband, son, and daughter in Portland, Oregon.