Karen Whalley lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she grew up. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Harvard Review, Blue Unicorn, Passages North, Bellowing Ark, and Shades. In 2001 she was the receipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Poetry. She has taught English at Peninsula College. The Rented Violin is her first book.

About The Rented Violin:

"Most first books of poetry are hardly more than a delightful nosegay of early spring blooms. Here is one, however, that fills us with the deeper delights of a bouquet gathered in a later and more mature season. Karen Whalley's poems are made from humble material: the quotidian realities of ordinary, stoical people who have constructed lives from mortgages and childrearing, shopping malls and interstate motels, doctor's appointments and cutting the grass. What Whalley sees beneath the surfaces of those lives is the terrible price of foregoing beauty. Her feel for the unconscious agony of hurt and longing that so many people carry about with them reminds us of James Wright. Like him, she has mastered the art of unpacking, in simple language and delicate metaphor, the yearning for transformation that is at the center of our human spirituality. 'Make it beautiful / And it will save you,' she says in the title poem, and that is what she does. I am stunned by the wisdom of these poems, and pierced by their heart-lurching beauty."
—Kate Daniels