Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, The Antidote, was a finalist for the National Book Award and is currently longlisted for the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane Prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, Zoetrope, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, and Conjunctions, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. 

With composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone and choreographer and director Troy Schumacher, she co-created BalletCollective’s genre-straddling work, The Night Falls—one of the New York Times’ Best Dance Performances of 2023. Her story “Proving Up” was adapted into a critically acclaimed opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek. Her latest collaboration with Mazzoli and Vavrek—an original opera, The Galloping Cure—will premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2026 and come to the San Francisco Opera in 2027.

She has taught creative writing and literature at Columbia University, Williams College, Bryn Mawr College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California, Irvine, and held the Endowed Chair of the Texas State University MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile library and network of care for people living outdoors.