Karen Harryman’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Poetry New Zealand, and the Cortland Review, as well as other print and online journals. Before moving to Los Angeles, she lived and worked in Kentucky for most of her life. Currently, she teaches English and creative writing at YULA, an Orthodox Jewish high school in Los Angeles. Auto Mechanic's Daughter is her first book.

Books by Karen Harryman: Auto Mechanic's Daughter

Other poems on the web by Karen Harryman:
"Bourbon Fire"
"Convalescence"

About Auto Mechanic's Daughter:

"In Karen Harryman's hands, everything becomes a blessing."
—Ellen Bass

"Karen Harryman's poems are like the paintings of an artist who has fought her way back through hip sophistication and cynicism to a place where—without pretentious claim to outsider or naive art—she has regained the ability to see and paint like a gifted child. Her sympathy and attention go naturally to the working invisible—to busboys, mechanics, waitresses, custodians—members of what it's still okay to call 'white trash.' But, as Harryman reminds us, quietly and without harangue, there is no such thing as human trash, and the voiceless of our species lead lives every bit as rich in feeling and desire as those in the scribbling, chattering classes."
—Jeffrey Skinner

"Charting the vicissitudes of her own life, and the travails and triumphs of those whom she knows and loves, Harryman travels great distances in her poems, both internally and geographically, from the Kentucky of her youth to the California of her present (with a detour in Europe). In this movement we encounter moments of wisdom and insight, the small epiphanies derived from love and loss, grief and celebration, dreams and nightmares, curses and blessings, gratitude and despair..."
—Maurya Simon