Karen Hays

Karen Hays is a nonfiction writer who left a career in geology and hydrogeology in 2001 to raise a family and write. Her essays have appeared in the Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Passages North, and The Normal School. She won the Iowa Review Award for Nonfiction and was named a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation winner. She lives on California's Monterey Peninsula. Her essay 'The Clockwise Detorsion of Snails' was singled out as a Notable Nonrequired Reading in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. She has also read from her book Harm's Way, which deals with trauma and the experiences of stalked and abused women.