Karen Rigby was born in 1979 in Panama City, Panama. She is the author of Chinoiserie (2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Ahsahta Press, 2012) as well as the chapbooks Savage Machinery and Festival Bone. Awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and a grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, she has been published in venues including Poetry Daily, Washington Square, Meridian, Field, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West and New England Review. Her poetry is anthologized in Best New Poets 2008, among others.

She is a founding editor and one of the webmasters of Cerise Press, an international online journal of literature, arts, and culture. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews for BookBrowse and industry magazines including ForeWord Reviews, Kirkus Reviews, and others. Her work has appeared in Next American City, High Country News and The Writer. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University (BA 2001) and the University of Minnesota (MFA 2004). Karen currently writes in Arizona.