Karen Christensen is an American entrepreneur, environmentalist, and author who cofounded Berkshire Publishing Group in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1998, after working in London at Blackwell Scientific Publications and Faber & Faber. She is owner and CEO of Berkshire Publishing, and co-author of the new edition of The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg's influential book that first coined the term third place.
Christensen's family came from the American Midwest. She was born in Indiana. Her father was a computer engineer and she grew up in Silicon Valley, in California. She was educated in the UK and at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied with the critic Marvin Mudrick (whose books she began republishing in 2017). She had turned down Yale to study with Mudrick and turned down a post-graduation job at Condé Nast in New York.
Christensen began her writing career with several cover stories for the UCSB alumni magazine, including a travel memoir and a feature about the Institute for Theoretical Physics, which included interviews with physicist Lee Smolin. After college she went first to Australia and then to London, where she worked at Blackwell Scientific Publications and then for Faber & Faber as secretary and editorial assistant to Valerie Eliot on the first volume of T. S. Eliot's Letters (1988). Her memoir Dear Mrs. Eliot was the cover story in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian'sReview. [1] and when Valerie Eliot died in 2012 Christensen was quoted in The Times, the New York Times, and the Independent articles about the Eliot legacy. Christensen was working with Sophia Mumford, widow of Lewis Mumford, on a book about her life when Mumford died in 1997. [2]
After returning to the United States in 1990 to promote the US edition of her first book, Home Ecology, she took a job as managing editor of the Encyclopedia of U.S. Foreign Relations, working with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In 1998 she cofounded Berkshire Publishing Group. She made her first trip to China in 2001 while working on the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia for Charles Scribner's Sons and later developed a number of China-related publications including Guanxi: The China Letter, the Encyclopedia of China, and ChinaConnectU.com. [3] In 2017, she announced a partnership with the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, part of the China Publishing Group, and their plans for an International Editorial Center in New York and Beijing.
Christensen worked closely with William H. McNeill until his death in 2016, frequently writing about him as well as collaborating on the Encyclopedia of World History and other books. She was the senior editor of the SAGE Encyclopedia of Community and co-editor of the Scribners Encyclopedia of Modern Asia as well as The Business of Sustainability. She is the author of several popular environmental handbooks and a children's picture book, Rachel's Roses, published by Barefoot Books. Her books have been translated into French, German, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai.
Christensen was a speaker on women's issues for the UK Green Party and a trustee of the Environmental Design Association as well as a founding member of the Women's Environmental Network. She has served on the board of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Content Division, and was an appointed and then elected member of the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee. In 2015, she ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Great Barrington Select Board. She is a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. She was a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Press until her controversial resignation in 2021. [4]
Christensen founded the Train Campaign, [5] an educational outreach project to support the revival of passenger train service in the United States. She lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she runs a popular listserv called TheHillGB. [6]
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He was a leading figure in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated the art through the use of language, writing style, and verse structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Faber and Faber Limited, commonly known as Faber & Faber or simply Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Anne Barbara Ridler OBE was a British poet and Faber and Faber editor, selecting the Faber A Little Book of Modern Verse with T. S. Eliot (1941). Her Collected Poems were published in 1994. She turned to libretto work and verse plays; it was later in life that she earned official recognition, receiving an OBE in 2001.
Esmé Valerie Eliot was the second wife and later widow of the Nobel prize-winning poet T. S. Eliot. She was a major shareholder in the publishing firm of Faber and Faber Limited and the editor and annotator of a number of books dealing with her late husband's writings.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
John Carey is a British literary critic, and post-retirement (2002) emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.
Hugo Williams is an English poet, journalist and travel writer. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999 and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.
Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.
Canongate Books is an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Maggie Mary Gee is an English novelist. In 2012, she became a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
William Hardy McNeill was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987. In 1980-81 he held the George Eastman Professorship at the University of Oxford.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
Berkshire Publishing Group LLC was founded in 2000 by editor and author Karen Christensen and anthropologist David Levinson as an academic reference book producer, developing encyclopedias for Scribner's, Routledge, Sage, Macmillan, H. W. Wilson, and ABC-CLIO. The company became an independent imprint in 2005, with the launch of Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, edited by William H. McNeill, Jerry H. Bentley, David Christian, et al. In 2009, it began publishing individual course titles as well as major encyclopedias. The company is owned by Karen Christensen and operates internationally from Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Classics?" and "What Is a Classic?" have been essayed by authors from different genres and eras. The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Sainte-Beuve. These books can be published as a collection such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, or Penguin Classics or presented as a list, such as Harold Bloom's list of books that constitute the Western canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
Winslow Eliot, also known as Ellie Winslow, is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She is the author of ten novels, which have been translated into twelve languages including Greek, Swedish, French, Italian, and Japanese, and have been published in twenty countries.
Sarah Howe is a Chinese-British poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London, as well as a trustee of The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. There were 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956; they were made accessible to the public on January 2, 2020.
Frank Vigor Morley was an American mathematician, author, editor and publishing executive. As had his two older brothers, Christopher and Felix, Morley attended Haverford College and then studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Morley worked in book publishing in London and New York and played a significant role in the early history of the publishing firm Faber and Faber, where he became a close friend of the poet T. S. Eliot.
Karen Berger is an American writer, long-distance backpacker, and speaker. She is the author of adventure narratives, guidebooks, instructional books, and essays about the U.S. national scenic and historic trails, worldwide trails, and hiking and backpacking skills and techniques.
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