Karen Christensen is an American author, social critic, activist, and entrepreneur. She has been an intrepid solo traveler since age fourteen, in love with books and global vistas, and became a journalist in college, spending summers working in London. She returned to London after graduation to write and work in publishing, and got her first book contract at 29. As a young mother, she wrote a number of popular and successful environmental books including Home Ecology and The Armchair Environmentalist.

Back in the US with two small children, she founded an academic publishing company and has worked with scholars and experts around the world. She is especially known for her connections in China; in 2025, she was a guest of the China Writers Association and the Chinese Association for International Understanding. When author Simon Winchester spoke about The Man Who Loved China in New York, he commented that Karen, like Joseph Needham, was an “ocean thinker.”

She is the owner and CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, a controverial former trustee of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Press, a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and an associate in research at the Harvard Fairbank Center.

A couple old favorites:

Note: This is a new page, March 2026, being updated as we prepare for the work ahead. Much recent material is at Substack.