About Karen
Karen Stabiner's essays about women, age, and identity appear in The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, often from her perch at the end of the bar, enjoying dinner for one.
She has been a journalist since she joined her high school newspaper -- and found out that she had no chance of being named editor because she was a girl. Karen left that attitude and her midwestern mid-century upbringing behind to become an author, journalist, and adjunct professor at the Columbia University graduate school of journalism. While the dignified label for what she does is narrative non-fiction, or immersion journalism, she prefers to think of herself as a fly on the wall, looking for stories in what she observes.
She is the author of Generation Chef, which follows a young chef as he opens his first restaurant and chronicles the upheaval in that riskiest of businesses. Her other books include To Dance with the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer, a New York Times Notable Book, and her personal favorite, My Girl: Adventures with a Teen in Training. She has also written two cookbooks and two novels.
Karen's work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Eater LA, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, Gourmet (a James Beard award finalist), Saveur, Vogue, and Mother Jones. She was for three years the west coast editor of The Counter, a nonprofit digital newsroom, until its untimely demise in May, 2022; her work anchored a 2021 SABEW award for general excellence.
During ten years at Columbia, Karen created a class in food writing and taught reporting and feature writing.
She writes about restaurants not as a trend-chaser but as a loyal regular. They are, for her, an essential "third place," a space that is not home, not work, but provides a much-needed sense of community.