KAREN KINGSBURY

Co-author of Forever Young: Ten Gifts of Faith for the Graduate

Karen Kingsbury is the best-selling, award-winning author of more than thirty titles.  There are more than two million copies of her books in print, including one which was made into a CBS Movie-of-the-Week. Currently Gideon’s Gift is in development for a major motion picture. She was recently feature in TIME magazine and on Fox News and is in demand as a public speaker. 

Karen Kingsbury knew she wanted to be a writer from the time she was five years old. One night that year she sat down and penned a book titled "The Horse" which is still on her bookshelf today. During her first two years of college Karen attended Pierce Junior College and wrote for the Roundup, Pierce's award-winning newspaper. While there she won a statewide first place feature writing competition.  She then attended Cal State University Northridge where she wrote for the Daily Sundial and interned at the Los Angeles Times in the sports department. She graduated in 1986 with her journalism degree.

With the Times experience behind her, Karen's first full-time job was at the Simi Valley Enterprise just outside Los Angeles. There she covered sports, religion, and occasionally breaking news.  Karen quickly moved to the Los Angeles Daily News where she worked in the sports department and began writing stories on the local professional teams - Dodgers, Lakers, and Raiders. It was during that time that she realized she would not want to be a pro-beat sports writer, following a professional team around the country and writing stories exclusively about that team.

It was shortly after marrying her husband, Donald, that Karen accepted an offer to write feature stories for the Daily News’ front page Sunday edition. The first story on the new job was about a high school girl killed by her best friends. It was a murder the girls hid from police and grieving family members of the victim for three years. Karen broke the story open for the media and prosecution team alike.

Months later she sold the story to People Magazine, where it appeared in September 1989, the same month her first child was born.  Eight days before Karen's maternity leave was finished, a New York agent, Arthur Pine, called Karen and told her he'd found her an amazing book deal. The advance was three times her annual salary.

Karen went into the Daily News and quit the next day. Since then she hasn't worked a day outside her home office and credits God's faithfulness in letting her stay home as each of her three children were born—and now with three newly adopted children from Haiti.

Karen's book, Missy's Murder, was published in 1992 and was followed by three other true crime titles, all published by Dell Publishing. She began thinking of other books she might write, and after taking a trip to a high school Christian camp with her husband, she found her idea.

One of the counselors at the camp shared a story about his tragic car accident. His truck rolled off the side of the road and into a canyon while he was driving his three-year-old daughter back up to their cabin. The truck was totaled and lay crumpled 400 feet down the hillside, and his daughter was missing from the vehicle. After the man crawled up the hillside, he found her in a soft bush. She told her daddy that "the angels had taken her out of the car and set her there." Police could later offer no other explanation. This true story gave Karen an idea. "After writing four true crime books, I was ready for a change," Karen says.

Her next four books were collections of answered prayers and miracle stories. Those books, written under the pen name Kelsey Tyler, were published by Berkley Publishing and are out of print. She has, however, written a new collection of fictionalized miracle stories for Warner Books.

After writing four miracle books in the early nineties, she wrote her first novel, Where Yesterday Lives. That book is loosely based on her own life and background.  She tried to sell Where Yesterday Lives to her New York secular publishers, but they wouldn't bite. "I had an editor tell me she loved the book. It made her laugh and cry and she couldn't put it down. But it didn't have foul language or sex scenes, so they couldn't publish it. She even told me that she didn't think I would improve it by adding those things. Still, she couldn't publish it."

Determined to stick to her convictions, Karen refused to add anything to her novel. At about that time a friend told her to consider sending the novel to a Christian publisher. Today, Karen's books are regularly bestsellers, but she remains convinced that none of it would have been possible without God's direction and hand.

Karen Kingsbury is also a professional speaker, who has shared her life-changing stories with women's groups, college groups, and business gatherings. Her talks make readers laugh and cry and take a fresh look at their faith. Many times lives are changed in the process.

May 2005