I’m a poet, writer, mountain woman, and lover of film and pop culture. I published my first book, a memoir called Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (Scribner), about the 10 years I lived alone in a woodstove-heated cabin on top of a mountain with my husky, Elvis, in 2018.
Poet Simon Ortiz says “Always the Story,” and that’s how I approach my film and pop culture classes—we look for the stories we tell about ourselves and to each other about who we are and what we think is important by watching movies and YouTube videos or buying certain brands and posting on Instagram. Stories make up our lives and I believe it’s important to examine what some of them say about us. My other interests are gender and cultural studies, the American West and building community.
You can find my writing in The New York Times, Real Simple, Westword, LitHub, The Rumpus and numerous literary journals and on my blog: rougherbeauty.com. I still live in the mountains, now outside Rollinsville, Colorado. More at karenauvinen.com.