Karen Holmberg won the Vassar Miller Prize for her book The Perseids: Poems (University of North Texas Press, 2001). Her poems and essays have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Slate, The Nation, New England Review, and elsewhere. Influenced by a biologist father, she is interested in science, medicine, and the natural world. She received her PhD in English (poetry) at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She currently directs the MFA program at Oregon State University and lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband and two daughters.
