Karen Kao Wins 2025 Sarabande Prize in the Essay

Congratulations to the late Karen Kao whose work was chosen by Leslie Jamison as the 2025 Sarabande Prize in the Essay winner. The collection Swimming Upside Down is slated for publication in June 2027. Her piece “Cardamom Heals All Wounds” is featured in Issue 45.2 of the Pinch.

Karen Kao (1959-2025) worked as a novelist and essayist. She also wrote short fiction and poetry. Her debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle, the first of a projected quartet of novels set in Shanghai from the thirties to the fifties, was published in 2017. The second volume, The Pencil God was finished but remains unpublished. Karen’s essays had garnered significant acclaim, including winning the Sweet Lit Flash Fiction Contest 2024, a 2024 Notable by The Best American Essays, and winner of the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest. Her fiction and nonfiction received several Pushcart Prize nominations and her short fiction was nominated for the VERA. Karen’s work can still be found on Substack. Before her passing she finished a collection of lyric essays under the title Swimming Upside Down.