Karen Klockner wrote a paper in Mrs. Hammershock's fourth grade class about ancient Greek and Phoenician letterforms, and has been hooked on typography and bookmaking ever since. She has accumulated thirty years of experience in children’s book publishing—as an editor, reviewer, translator, and bookseller, and most recently as a literary agent. Among the authors and artists she has worked with are Trina Schart Hyman, Jennifer Owings Dewey, Ann Grifalconi, Ed Young, Cris Peterson, Margaret Hodges, Clare Beaton, Karen Williams, and Susan Campbell Bartoletti.

Karen has an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a master’s in English from Simmons College in Boston. She attended the first summer institute in children’s literature at Simmons, which led to a job at the Horn Book Magazine and a fifteen-year career in Boston publishing. She rose to senior editor at Little, Brown, and later held the same position at Orchard. When a job change took her family to Ohio, she began a busy freelance business, developing, editing, and packaging children’s books for several major publishers. In 2001 she joined Transatlantic, an international literary agency based in Toronto. There she specialized in representing illustrators as well as writers of picture books and nonfiction; in addition to cultivating relationships with a wide array of editors and publishers, she gained a solid working knowledge of contracts and rights management.

Karen recently returned to the New York area, where she grew up, and is happy to be close to the center of publishing once again.