Karen Smyte

Karen is founder of Red Beard Press, a youth-driven publishing press based out of Ann Arbor’s teen center, The Neutral Zone, is currently a fiction student in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. A former Canadian National Team rower and collegiate rowing coach, Smyte spent her time at Mesa Refuge working on an essay about her experiences recording incarcerated mothers and grandmothers reading bedtime stories to their children at the Michigan Women’s Prison in her work for the Children’s Literacy Network of Ann Arbor.