Karen Auvinen is an award-winning poet, mountain woman, life-long westerner, writer, and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Rough Beauty, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Willa Award. Her work has appeared most recently in The New York Times, High Desert Journal, LitHub, Ascent, and The Colorado Sun and a collection of short stories about outliers in the West is forthcoming. Karen teaches at the University of Colorado – Boulder and lives at 8600 feet within the Roosevelt National Forest with the artist Greg Marquez, their dog, River, and Dottie the Cat. More at https://www.karenauvinen.com/

Karen Auvinen

Author of Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living

Colorado Book Award and Willa Award Finalist

Twitter:  @karenjamestown

Instagram: @awomansplaceisinthewild

Facebook:  Karen Auvinen Author

Topics:

Learning to live through our relationship with our pets! It was an amazing discussion, even beyond what I could have imagined considering how wonderfully she wrote about her dog in her book.

Order of the Good Death: https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/

Sisu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisu

Labor Union history in Philadelphia: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/a-labor-day-history-of-philadelphia-home-of-americas-first-general-strike

Generational Trauma: which is a big topic and if you don't know much about it, here's an interesting article on it:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/daily-videos/can-trauma-be-passed-to-next-generation-through-dna/

And of course life in the mountains and what community here means!