Karen Auvinen PhD

Biography

Karen Auvinen is a poet, writer, mountain woman, outlier and life-long westerner, and author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (Scribner), finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Willa Award. 

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Terrain.org, LitHub, Real Simple, Westword and The Rumpus, as well as High Desert Journal, Ascent Magazine, Cold Mountain Review and The Columbia Review, among others. Her fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and her poetry has won two Academy of American Poets Awards. She is the 2024 winner of the Barry Lopez Nonfiction Prize and the author of A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild, on Substack. A collection of stories about outliers in the West is forthcoming and she is working on a novel about her Finnish ancestors in North Dakota. 

Past gigs include Writer-in-Residence for the State of Colorado, editor, book-buyer, rural postal route driver, caterer, clinic assistant, landscaper, summer camp director and guest chef. She lives at 8600 feet with her partner, the artist Greg Marquez, and their puppy, Yuki, within the Roosevelt National Forest and the ancestral territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. 

Publications

Book

Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living. Scribner, 2018. Paperback Edition, 2019. Translated into Russian, 2019.

Recent Fiction

“Love, Hank.” High Desert Journal. Issue 32. Spring 2021. https://www.highdesertjournal.com/karen-auvinen-love-hank
“Winter.” Cold Mountain Review. Spring, 2014. Appalachian State University.
“The Karate Boys. Ascent Magazine. Spring 2014. Moorehead College, MN.

Recent Non-Fiction & Essay

“Building the Fire: How Routine and Practice Create a Spark.” Writers Stories in Motion: Healing Joy and Triumph. Laura
A. Gray-Rosendale, Ed. Peter Lang, October 2020.
“The Hard Choice: Coronavirus and Staying Put,” The Colorado Sun. “Write On.” March, 24, 2020.
“How Daily Walks Prepared Me for Tragedy.” Real Simple Magazine. July 27, 2018.
“Surviving Winter in the Rockies in the Name of Writing.” LitHub. June 8, 2018.
“Summer and Smoke: Forty Seasons of Rough Beauty. Westword. Denver, CO. June 5, 2018.
“The Fox Who Came to Dinner.” Menagerie. The New York Times. Web. May 4, 2015.

Recent Poetry

“husk gathering,” The Columbia Review, vol 96. no 2. Spring 2015. 16.