Karen Brennan

Karen Brennan received her BA from Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Massachusetts in 1963, her MFA from Goddard College in 1979, and a PhD in English from the University of Arizona in 1990.

Brennan is the author of eight books. Her three books of poetry are Little Dark (Four Way Books, 2014); The Real Enough World (Wesleyan University Press, 2005); and Here on Earth (Wesleyan University Press, 1988). Brennan’s latest book, Television, a Memoir (Four Way Books, 2022), is a hybrid work of poetry and autobiography. 

Brennan is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a winner of the 1990 AWP Short Fiction Award for her short prose collection Wild Desire (University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). Her other prizes include the 1987 PEN Syndicated Short Fiction Prize, the 1986 Sonora Review Poetry Prize, and the 1986 Academy of American Poets Prize. 

Brennan has served as professor emerita in the creative writing and English departments at the University of Utah and is a core faculty member in Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, where she has taught since 1991.