ROUGH BEAUTY

In the vein of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk, this stunning debut memoir by an award-winning writer tells the story of a woman who, through solitude and communion with nature, finds her place in the world and her way back to community.

At a crossroads in her life, Karen Auvinen flees to a primitive cabin on the Front Range of the Rockies to live in solitude as a writer and to embrace all the beauty and brutality nature has to offer. When a fire incinerates every word she has ever written and all of her possessions, save her beloved husky Elvis, her truck, and four singed artifacts, Karen embarks on a heroic journey to reconcile her desire to be alone with her need for community.

In the spirit of works by Annie Dillard, Helen Macdonald, and Cheryl Strayed, Karen Auvinen's memoir is as much an inward as it is an outward pilgrimage.

This book is a luminous, lyric exploration of and homage to her forty seasons on the mountain, embracing the unpredictability and grace of living intimately with the forces of nature while making peace with her own wildness.


A former Artist-in-Residence for the State of Colorado, Karen has won two Academy of American Poets awards and has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes in fiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and numerous literary journals. She earned her M.A. in poetry from the University of Colorado Boulder, under the mentorship of Lucia Berlin, and went on to earn her PhD in fiction writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She currently teaches film and popular culture at the University of Colorado - Boulder.