Karen Kevorkian is an American poet based in Los Angeles. Her fourth poetry collection is Here in My Body it Feels Crowded, a chapbook (Walton Well Press, 2025). Her other poetry collections are Quivira (Three: A Taos Press, 2020), Lizard Dream (What Books Press, 2009), and White Stucco Black Wing (Red Hen Press, 2004). 

A native of San Antonio, Texas, Kevorkian attended the University of Texas in Austin before moving to San Francisco. She later earned an MFA at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and did subsequent graduate work at the University of Utah. Returning to California she worked as an editor of exhibition catalogues for The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, later returning to UVA where she taught poetry and fiction writing workshops in the English department. She relocated again to teach poetry and fiction writing workshops in the English department of the University of California Los Angeles. She now makes her home in Los Angeles with her spouse the historian Dell Upton.

She’s been awarded fellowships from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, the Ucross Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. In Los Angeles she is a founding member of the Glass Table Artists Collective and a former board of trustees member of Beyond Baroque literary arts organization.

Her poems are published in the journals New American Review, Four Way Review, Furious Pure, Laurel Review, Verse Daily, Taos Journal of Poetry, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Terminus Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Levure littéraire, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Pool, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Poetry International, Spillway, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, New World Writing, Agni Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Literary Review, Borderlands, the Rio Grande Review, River City Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Archipelago, The Drunken Boat, Poetry Flash, Third Coast, Hambone, and other places.

Anthologies publishing her poems include Pratik: The LA Issue, Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts in Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press), Casita Poems: Poets of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Jambu Press), The Land of Wandering (publishers left, University of Virginia Press), Line Drives (Southern Illinois University Press), and American Sports Poems (Orchard Books).

Her fiction is published in Fiction International, Five Fingers Review, Furious Fictions, and Mississippi Review. Her book reviews are in Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, Poetry International, and Virginia Quarterly Review.