Karen, a Jewish lesbian, is a graduate of the prestigious Canadian Film Centre's Writer's Lab and Professional Screenwriting Programme, where she wrote two feature screenplays and a short film, Straight in the Face, which was produced in the Universal Studios Short Dramatic Film Program and has screened at numerous film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival.

She was awarded a B.C. Film Screenwriter's Fellowship to write a feature length screenplay (Better than Chocolate) under the mentorship of veteran screenwriter Peggy Thompson. Karen also wrote an episode of Keys Cut Here, a drama series, produced by Omni Film Productions for CTV.

Karen is the award-winning author of In Her Nature, a collection of short stories which won the 1996 VanCity Book Prize, and Love Ruins Everything, a novel which was named one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Bay Area Reporter. She is the editor of numerous anthologies of contemporary fiction. She writes for The Vancouver Sun, The Lambda Book Report, DIVA, Curve, Girlfriends, and other magazines.

She is currently working on a new novel, a screenplay and editing several new anthologies of contemporary fiction. Her latest novel, The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, was released in 2003. She teaches creative writing workshops at Langara College and summer weekend workshops on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coas, does freelance editing and consulting and lives in Vancouver.