About Karen
Karen Stabiner was for three years the west coast editor of The Counter, a nonprofit digital newsroom, until its untimely demise in May, 2022; her work contributed to a 2021 SABEW award for general excellence. 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. 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. She has also written two cookbooks and two novels.
Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Eater LA, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, Gourmet (a James Beard award finalist), Saveur, Vogue and Mother Jones. Karen was a founder of an alternative newspaper in Santa Barbara, California, and graduated from the University of Michigan.
Karen spent ten years as an adjunct professor in the M.S. program at Columbia University Journalism School, where she created a class in food writing and taught reporting and feature writing.