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Karen knew she wanted to be a writer when she was 3.  She sat on her bed gazing at her book, The Bee Man of Orn, thinking “What power there is in creating imaginary worlds!  The reader is automatically transported into a reality that you created.  She hears your characters talking, sees the vistas you painted with words.”  Then she realized she had better learn to read.

When Karen was 12, she had a dream of being in a village on the coast of Kenya, so at 23 she bought a one-way plane ticket to Nairobi to find the village.  She climbed the Mountains of the Moon in Rwanda to see mountain gorillas, hitchhiked overland through Egypt, Uganda, Zaire, and Zambia, lived with the Turkana in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, went down the Congo on a decrepit steamer, and sailed up the Nile on a leaky dhow.

Her first three novels were historical fiction involving precolonial African explorers.  Since she was always either accused or praised (depending how you look at it) for writing overly steamy sex scenes, erotic romance was the natural next step.  She is currently writing about the rough and tumble life of the California gold rush, and lives in Northern California with her Newfoundland dog.

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