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. Not a particularly bright student, Karen indulges an insatiable curiosity for useless information.

Despite her trailer park beginnings, Karen managed to graduate, without honors, 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, when she could've just as easily gotta job at Dairy Queen and made a pile more money than she does now.

Karen's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, St. Petersburg Times, The Oregonian, and a bunch of other newspapers and magazines and on Beatrice.com.

Karen also served as a panelist/judge for the National Endowment of the Arts Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, Random House, 2006.

She's married to a pretty decent Yankee, and is the mother of four adult children and mother-in-law to a verified Sinner.

She divides her time between her home in Oregon and her hometown in Georgia. Karen is currently working on The Arrow that Flies by Day, a novel set in East Tennessee. She claims it will be her first "bass-saller".