Kara (pronounced kǎra) grew up in Ohio and Indiana, graduated from Vassar College and holds a Masters in Literary Cultures from New York University and a subsequent Master’s of Social Work. She spent a semester in Moscow and has traveled and written in France, Prague, Italy, Poland, and London. She now resides in New York with her husband and two sons.

Kara recently completed revisions on the memoir, EXIT WOUND: SUICIDE IS NOT A LOVE STORY, and is editing a novel, COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS. She has published in literary journals such as Quarterly West (“Sarajevo Calling”) and Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts (“My Father’s Guns”). Her story “Moscow When I Was Young” was chosen in the Top 25 for Glimmer Train‘s February 2012 Short Story Award for New Writers. Her novel COUNTRIES OF LOST THINGS was  selected as a Semi-Finalist in the Novel-in-Progress category for the 2010 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and was again a Semi-Finalist in 2012 in the Novel and Narrative Non-Fiction category, accompanied by her memoir, EXIT WOUND, on the Short List. She continues to edit an earlier novel, DOWN THE STREET A BUILDING BURNED, centered on the war in Yugoslavia, an excerpt of which has appeared in Hypothetical. Some of her recent essays can be read at Highbrow Magazine and in Cari Luna’s “Writer, with Kids” series. Kara has also contributed to The Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poets & Writers Magazine.

Kara founded Voices From War, offering writing workshops for veterans and related programming, in 2013. She is also now a psychodynamic psychotherapist (LMSW).