About

Karen G. Anderson is a Seattle-based writer and editor. Her work spans journalism, arts reviewing, blogging, public speaking, and social media consulting.

She writes fiction and poetry as K.G. Anderson and on occasion narrates the work of other authors. (Here’s a list of her published short fiction and edited anthologies.) Her office in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood on the land of the Duwamish People, and she participates in Real Rent Duwamish.

Karen has written for Rover and the Seattle Times, and is an occasional contributor to January Magazine and Locus. She did a humor column about home ownership and life in Seattle and currently edits anthologies for B Cubed Press. She won a 2024 Muse Medallion from the Cat Writers’ Association for this online article, “The Long Tale of Mr. Tippy.”

She worked at Apple as a staff writer for iReview, the producer for iCards, and the managing editor for Apple’s one-million-member .Mac Internet services website (the forerunner of iCloud). She was part of the launch team for the iTunes Music Store. Before Apple, Karen edited Northwest Health magazine for Group Health Cooperative/Kaiser Permanente Washington and managed public information at Battelle’s Seattle Research Center. She was a reviewer for the original Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, reported for the Hartford Courant and the New Haven Register, and freelanced for the Boston Globe Travel section.

Her past clients and contract agencies include Anthro-Tech, Concurrent Product Development, Houzz.com, 10x Medical Device Conference, Medical Marcom, Naples Florida Vacation Homes, Profound Networks, Promontory Press, Roambee, Virtuoso, Web1 Consulting, and Plymouth Housing.

Community Involvement — Karen belongs to professional organizations including the National Book Critics Circle, Broad Universe, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), and the Cat Writers’ Association. She is a past chair of the board of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, a past president of the board of Northwest Folklife, and has served on boards and organizing committees for groups including the Pat Graney Dance Company, Foolscap, Potlatch, Lonestarcon3, and the Two Hour Transport reading series.

WATCH: Here’s Karen’s Ignite Seattle presentation “What You’ll Wish You’d Known Before You Joined that Nonprofit Board.”

Technology Writing — Karen wrote the ebook Take Control of iPhone Basics and edited ebooks including Take Control of iWeb ’09 and the classic Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner. She gave a RapidFire talk about the iPhone at MacWorld iWorld and was interviewed by Seattle 24×7.

Blogging / Social Media / Websites — A reviewer for the early Webby Awards, Karen has helped major companies design blogs and social media programs. Here she talks about the history of blogging on Chuck Joiner’s MacVoices TV.

Essays and Commentary — Karen’s bylined articles appear in a variety of news, trade, and literary publications and websites. Early in her career, she did commentary for KUOW-FM, Seattle’s NPR radio station. Her essay “Letters from My Past” appears in Laugh Out Loud, the 2018 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop anthology edited by Allia Zobel Nolan. She was interviewed by The Australian Planthunter about gardening mysteries. Her memoir about meeting a Holocaust survivor in a deserted Polish cemetery appears in Issue 81 of Journey Planet online.

READ AND LISTEN:

“I live in a city whose name is synonymous with ‘coffee.’ What’s a poor tea drinker to do?” — radio commentary on KUOW-FM.

“Fuzzy. Persistent. Persnickety. Annoying. Allergy-inducing. I’m referring here not to felines, but to the literary subgenre of cat mysteries…” — review of cat mysteries at January Magazine.

“For women in their early 50s, a no-sweat 20-minute workout is about as useful as sprinkling salt substitute on your large order of greasy french fries.” — essay on fitness in In Our Prime: Empowering Essays by Women.