Karen Palmer

Biography

Karen Palmer is the author of the novels Border Dogs (Soho, 2002) and All Saints (Soho, 1997). She has received an NEA Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, and her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Five Points, Arts & Letters, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. 

See Work

FICTION / Summer 2022

Birds of Paradise

By Karen Palmer ,  Illustration by Richard A. Chance

There is no work for Logan, not today, not in this L.A. neighborhood where he’s been wandering for hours. Since the riots began he’s steered clear of the Boulevard, wary of the Guardsmen stationed outside CVS, of the rivers of broken glass...

illustration by Richard A. Chance
MEMOIR / Spring 2016

The Reader Is the Protagonist

By Karen Palmer ,  Illustration by Thomas Allen

The summer of 1989, shortly after my second husband and I married, we buckled my two daughters, who were seven and three, into the rear seat of a used car purchased for cash. We told no one where we were going. We meant to disappear.