Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Vampires in the Lemon Grove and Swamplandia!, one of the NYT’s ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel The Antidote was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. She is the grateful recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NYPL’s Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” award, and was selected for Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. She’s the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, and the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, among other honors. She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter.

Established in 2010, The Lawrence A. Sanders Prize, made possible by the Lawrence Sanders Award Endowment, is given annually by the FIU Creative Writing Program to honor a writer of fiction whose work embodies wide appeal and literary excellence.