Bio

Karen Spears Zacharias grew up in several Georgia trailer parks where her brother taught her how to outrun the cops, and her mother taught her how to load cinder blocks in a hurry.

Despite her trailer park beginnings, Karen managed to graduate from Oregon State University, with a B.S. in Communications, which her mama swears she mastered long before Karen wasted all that money on college. She was awarded the C.B. Blethen for Distinguished Feature Writing in 2002 and has won several Oregon Newspaper Publishers Awards, including Best Enterprise reporting and feature writing.

Her work has been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, National Public Radio, C-Span, BookTV, The New York Times, Newsweek, and others.

She's married to a pretty decent Yankee. Tim is a James Madison Fellow, and holds a Masters in history from Washington State University. He teaches history at Hermiston High School, where he also serves as an assistant coach for football and basketball.

Karen is the mother of four delightful and devoted adult children, and mother-in-law to a verified Sinner. That's not a commentary on his character. That's really his name.

She divides her time between her home in Oregon and her hometown in Georgia.

Karen has completed her debut novel, Mother of Rain. The story takes place in the hill country of East Tennessee during the 1940s. Maizee Hurd is the young mother of a deaf-mute boy. Rain can't hear or speak a word, but his poor mama can't silence the voices in her own head.

Here's what novelist Lee Smith has to say about Mother of Rain:

Karen Spears Zacharias has carved a brilliant gem of a novel out of hard, uncompromising times and lives. Her remote mountain setting conceals misery, mystery, and madness -- but also love, which comes in many forms. Zacharias examines these intertwined lives with great compassion and daring; she is a wonderful writer.

The book is under review for publication.

Silas House. Janis Owens. Michael Morris. Lee Smith. Ron Rash. Sandra King. Jeannette Walls. Pat Conroy, including his cookbook, which was delightful in ohsomanyways that had nothing to do with food. Everything Anne River Siddons ever wrote. The Complete Works of Flannery O'Connor. Listen Here: Women writing on Appalachia. William Gay. Sonny Brewer. David Shipley's dandy-little book on email kindnesses. The Letters of Dr. Martin Luther King, which still have the power to make me weep. The sassy Eudora Welty. Jack Pendarvis, but not out loud and never to my kids. Phillip Yancey, particulary his book about grace, and Scot McKnight, who knows words longer than my arm. Janisse Ray, who wrote the most inventive book of the past two decades, The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. And I love Jim Whorton's spot-on characterizations of southern gents and rednecks. Poetry of Beth Ann Fennely and James Applegate and the Pslamists. And old notes from my children, drawn with rainbows and flowers and all the love a grip can hold.