Karen Loeb finished a two-year run May 2020 as Eau Claire’s Writer-in-Residence. Retired from teaching creative writing at UW-EC, she writes poetry and fiction at home in a room with artwork, including a David Hockney lithograph discovered in a resale store. Her writing has received an editor’s choice award in the Raymond Carver short story contest, and first place in the Wisconsin People and Ideas 2014 short story contest and the 2016 poetry contest. Her book Jump Rope Queen and Other Stories won a Minnesota Voices Project award. Her stories have also won PEN Syndicated Fiction Prizes, and she is a past recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Hanging Loose, Gyroscope Review, New Ohio Review, Volume One, Thema and other magazines. Loeb co-edited the 2020 poetry calendar for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, of which she’s also a member, and her Snapshots collaboration with a musician and photographer can be found on YouTube.
