2026 Pacific Northwest Book Awards Celebration for Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including The New York Times bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!, one of The New York Times’s ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the grateful recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NYPL’s Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award, and was selected for Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She’s the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter.