Karen Babine (pronounced bay-byne) is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015), and All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019). Her third book, The Allure of Elsewhere is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2025.

She is the founder and editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, whose goal is to publish the best nonfiction scholarship and pedagogy across disciplines. Her edited collection of Assay work, Beyond Truth and Fact: Innovations in the Craft of Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2027. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Eastern Washington University and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

She is currently a UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of  Tennessee-Chattanooga, where she was recognized with a UTAA Outstanding Teaching Award in 2023.