Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler was born in Bloomington, Indiana. At the age of 11 she moved to Palo Alto, California. She studied political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to do a master’s, during which she became pregnant with her first child. Several years later, Fowler enrolled in a creative writing course at UC Davis and began publishing science fiction stories. Her first novel, Sarah Canary, was published in 1991. The novel plays with the genres of science fiction, historical fiction, and mainstream fiction, and received praise from critics. Fowler went on to publish several more novels, of which We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the most recent. Fowler has noted that some of her novels have achieved enormous critical and commercial success (one of them, The Jane Austen Book Club, was adapted into a Hollywood movie) while others have done “very, very badly.” Fowler has two children and seven grandchildren and lives with her husband in Santa Cruz, California.