About Karen

Short Bio:

Karen S. Chow started writing novels as a college sophomore at Arizona State University, while earning a degree in electrical engineering. Now, she is an engineer by day and middle-grade novelist by night. She lives in Gilbert, AZ, with her family. Karen is represented by Andrea Cascardi at Transatlantic Agency.

Long Bio:

Karen S. Chow is a Taiwanese-American author. She started writing novels as a college sophomore at Arizona State University, while earning a degree in electrical engineering. She wrote and queried several books (mostly YA fiction), before discovering a love for writing middle grade contemporary fiction.

She wrote her first middle grade novel, Miracle, during NaNoWriMo 2016, which is a heart story that combines her love for music (she’s a band geek!), Harry Potter (she’s a Slytherin!), and adds her experiences witnessing her father passing away from cancer. She was a mentee in Pitch Wars 2017 with this novel, under Cindy Baldwin and Amanda Rawson Hill (#teammascaratracks). It eventually hooked her agent, Andrea Cascardi, through #DVPit and is her debut with Christy Ottaviano Books/Little, Brown BYR in March 2023. Karen was awarded the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Desert Sunrise Scholarship for OwnVoices in 2021 and the Out from the Margins Award in 2022.

When she’s not writing, she loves spending time with her three kids, hiking all over Arizona, and applying her electrical engineering know-how on rotorcraft (aka helicopters) at her day job. She lives in Gilbert, AZ.