Karen Braucher is the author of AQUA CURVES, winner of the 2005 Stevens Manuscript Competition (selected by Peter Meinke), and SENDING MESSAGES OVER INCONCEIVABLE DISTANCES, finalist for the Oregon Book Award (selected by Maxine Kumin), as well as two chapbooks, MERMAID CAFÉ and HEAVEN'S NET. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in atelier, Diner, fireweed, hipfish, Manzanita Quarterly, Pool, Puerto del Sol, Nervy Girl, the new renaissance, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, The Oregonian, Oregon Review, Paterson Literary Review, Rain, Rattle, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, and other places, including Portland's buses and trains through the national Poetry in Motion program.

Braucher has won the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Worcester Poetry Prize, the Bacchae Press chapbook competition, and two Oregon Literary Arts fellowships. She has had multiple careers in education and business and has three graduate degrees, including an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in writing from Vermont College/The Union Institute. She studied English literature, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she took a senior seminar with late poet Richard Hugo. While writing, occasionally teaching, raising a child, and running a small poetry press known as Portlandia, she lives and swims in Portland, Oregon. She is originally from Massachusetts.