I write about food, the environment, health and social issues—really, anything that interests me, which is a lot. I’ve been hooked on Asia ever since I spent a semester of graduate school in Hanoi more than a dozen years ago. Somehow I managed to wheedle my husband, photojournalist Jerry Redfern, into a life on the move. I took a newspaper job in Phnom Penh in 1998, shortly after we married, and we’ve been tromping through jungles and rice paddies ever since. For a long time, Jerry and I lumped our work beneath the wide umbrella of societies after war and under oppression. But we’ve strayed from that. We simply thrive on meeting interesting people and reporting on their lives. It’s a huge world of endlessly fascinating stories.

These days, most of my readers probably recognize me best as a food writer—though I never set out to be just that. I simply realized food was the most natural segue into other people’s lives.
Generous hosts feed us curry and serve us tea. Farmers discuss the changing monsoons and their diminishing harvests. The ability—or not—to feed a family is paramount. And it depends entirely on the environment, which is threatened everywhere. Those interests led me through five happy years as Gourmet’s Asia correspondent, with editors who allowed me to delve into the culture and environment of food—until Condé Nast killed the magazine in 2009. But the
important issues certainly didn’t disappear. Just as journalism faces its toughest times, so do the environment and this planet of hungry people.

On that note, I am spending the 2010-2011 academic year as a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. I will study graduate courses in food security and (I hope) create a forum linking scientists and journalists with farmers, fishers, cooks and generally interested eaters around the world.

Meanwhile, Jerry and I are finishing work on our joint book, An Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos (forthcoming, ThingsAsian Press), with a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dumped 4 billion pounds of bombs on Laos. Up to 30 percent of that ordnance did not explode, and much of it remains a danger in the soil today.

In 2011, ThingsAsian also will publish This Way More Better, a collection of travel essays spanning a dozen years. My first book, Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War (McFarland,
2005), winner of the August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award, examines everyday life in Cambodia since the end of war. My second book, Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World’s Largest Ocean (Nebraska, 2008), is a joint effort with Sharon Sites Adams,
who made nautical history in 1965 and again in 1969.

I’m the Southeast Asia correspondent for Archaeology and I write a Food Culture column for The Faster Times. My work appears in publications around the world such as GlobalPost, Wall Street Journal Asia, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, National Geographic Books, Fodor’s Travel Guides, DAYS Japan, GEO Spain, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and many others. I earned my master’s at the University of Oregon and my bachelor’s at The University of Montana. My first full-time journalism job took me to a small paper in a cold Wyoming boomtown, which pretty much nudged me toward the tropics.

After living in Thailand for four years, Cambodia (twice), and too many grotty Asian hotel rooms, Jerry and I bought a fixer-upper house on half an acre in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley. We now split the year between home and abroad. When we’re not meeting yak herders in the Himalaya or teaching journalism in Burma (and subsequently being deported), we’re repairing our little hacienda and planting grapes in a yard shared with big, fat toads that like to swallow beetles whole.

Karen, standing in the crater created by the demolition of a 750-pound bomb found in a farmer's field in Phongsali, Laos