Karen Bender
Karen E. Bender is an American novelist. Biography. Bender has taught fiction writing at the Writer's Voice program in New York, as well as the MFA programs at Antioch Los Angeles, Chatham University, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is currently the distinguished visiting professor of creative writing at Hollins University. She has received grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also co-editor of the nonfiction anthology "Choice". Karen E. Bender is the author of the short story collection "Refund", which was  on the shortlist for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the novels "A Town of Empty Rooms" and "Like Normal People"; "Like Normal People" was a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Writing about "A Town of Empty Rooms," reviewer S. Kirk Walsh said in the "Boston Globe", Her short stories have appeared in magazines, including "The New Yorker", "Granta", "Ploughshares", "Zoetrope", "Story", "The Kenyon Review", "Guernica", "Narrative", "The Harvard Review" and "The Iowa Review". Her fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories , New Stories from the South and The Pushcart Prize series and has been read as part of the "Selected Short" series at Symphony Space in New York. She has written nonfiction for "The New York Times", "Real Simple", "O" magazine and others.