Piper, Karen Lynnea 1965-

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Piper, Karen Lynnea 1965-

PERSONAL: Born 1965. Education: Earned an M.A.; University of Oregon, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES: Home— Columbia, MO. Office— Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia, 107 Tate Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-1500. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: University of Missouri-Columbia, associate professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS: Sierra Nature Writing Award, 1996; National Endowment of the Humanities grant, 2000; Huntington fellowship, 2000-01.

WRITINGS

Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2002.

Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A., Pal-grave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to journals, including Cultural Critique, American Indian Quarterly, MELUS, and Postcolonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon.

SIDELIGHTS: Karen Lynnea Piper is a member of the English department faculty at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity, Piper’s first book, looks at the ways in which mapping and cartographic techniques can be affected by gender and race. Eric H. Ash, in a review for Isis, noted that the book “provides a valuable analysis of the role played by modern cartographic technologies,” adding that “Piper’s writing is generally lucid, engaging, and free of jargon.” Geoffrey Stacks, writing for Modern Fiction Studies, stated that Piper’s effort “makes a strong case for the map as an essential tool of power both for the colonizer and the colonized.”

In Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A., Piper looks at a toxic dust problem in Los Angeles and the environmental discrimination it revealed. When Owens Lake was drained in the diversion of a river, the result was a dust bowl that produced toxic wind and polluted air—air that Piper herself grew up breathing. Donna Seaman, writing for Booklist, remarked: “Global concerns about the increase in windblown dust make Piper’s hard-hitting report especially significant.”