Karen Essex is a historical novelist, a screenwriter, and journalist. Essex was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. As a teenager, she got involved with the theatre and focused her collegiate studies on costume design and theatrical history at Tulane University. She later attended an interdisciplinary graduate program at Vanderbilt University, and in 1999, received an M. F. A. in Writing at Goddard College in Vermont. After college, Essex briefly modeled in Europe before returning to the U. S. where she found an entrée into the film industry as a costume designer. She moved into executive... positions, becoming vice-president of a subsidiary of Blake Edwards Entertainment and senior vice-president of Force Ten Productions, a bi-coastal company that financed Broadway, Off-Broadway, and motion pictures. By the early 1990s, she had given birth to her only child and had resigned from film production to pursue a career in writing. Essex first short story, “Three Audreys,” was published in The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas. Based on that story and on her knowledge of popular music, she was hired by L. A.
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