However, this wasn't always the case.
For half her life, Karen was fully entrenched in Corporate America. First, she was a structural engineer; then, she went to law school. She worked in litigation, then as in-house counsel at the subsidiary of a Fortune 200 company. After that? Chief Counsel. Then Chief of Staff. Her career was, by all accounts, humming along.
But Karen also had a secret life.
In her other, parallel life, Karen had been shooting with her trusty Nikons since the mid-nineties. Her first was a second-hand Nikon FE series film SLR camera. Years later, after a brief hiatus (and the gift of a Nikon D100 from her husband for Christmas), Karen started honing her photographic skills in earnest. Since she had started writing online about her young family (authoring a blog called Chookooloonks), she used her images to enhance her words. The combination worked: Chookooloonks was mentioned in the 2006 book Blogosphere: Best of Blogs, and was named one of the Best Adoption Blogs on the Web by Adoptive Families Magazine. Her secret life -- writing, photography, and social media -- led to writing, editing and producing gigs at AOL. As producer, Karen managed seven of the lifestyle blogs owned by Weblogs Inc., an AOL company, and during her tenure several of the blogs earned an average of over 1,000,000 page views per month.
Nowadays, Karen lives one big, integrated life: she takes the lessons of corporate America and digital media, and combines them with her photography and digital desktop skills to develop articles, online essays, and digital stories. She is the author of the upcoming book The Beauty of Different, designed to help the reader connect, inspire and reconsider those attributes that make the reader unique, and reframe them as characteristics of distinction -- maybe even superpowers. She is a seasoned public speaker, including having made several keynote speeches on topics as varied as parenthood, social media and women in leadership. She has appeared on both local and national television shows and other news media, including being quoted on CNN.com and an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her fine art pieces and projects have been included in exhibits around the country. She was one of the founding contributors to the collaborative website, Shutter Sisters, a photoblog aimed at inspiring and creating community among avid women photographers. She is the author of Through the Gadling Lens, a weekly column on the travel site Gadling.com, with tips and other information on how to take amazing travel shots. And she continues to maintain Chookooloonks (now a photoblog), and "curates" LensHouston, a photoblog hosted by the Houston Chronicle, and featuring the best of Houston amateur photography.
Karen is originally from Trinidad & Tobago, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her English husband, American daughter and Rufus the Wonderdog. She holds a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from Texas A&M University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Houston. She's a lover not a fighter, and really, just an all-round great gal.
for more information
To read more about The Beauty of Different, click here.
For news, appearances and upcoming events, click here.
To contact Karen directly, click here for her contact information.
And finally, to answer the burning question, "what on God's green Earth is a chookooloonks?" click here.