Karen has been a published author since 1991. She has authored, co-authored and contributed to a dozen books. Her other books include the Nature's Yucky series from Mountain Press; Nature's Yucky: Gross Stuff that Helps Nature Work, Nature's Yucky: Animals of the Desert Southwest and the forthcoming Nature's Yucky: Animals of the Eastern Region. Under her former name of Shanberg, she published books with Stan Tekiela for Adventure Publications, including Plantworks and Start Mushrooming. Wild edible harvesting and cooking remains a passion of Karen's, and she conducts wild edible cooking demonstrations at co-ops and festivals. Karen is also a poet and self published a book entitled Watering Rainbows:Poems of Proud Progressive. Her poem "Think Like a Tree" was selected to be published and to become a chapter title in US Children's Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman's book The Tree that Time Built. Karen has been the director of the City of Richfield's Wood Lake Nature Center since 1991, where she first met Senator Wellstone when he came to her first Earth day program.

She is currently on the Advisory Board of World Population Balance and gives talks on overpopulation and its effect on environmental and social justice issues. Feel free to contact her for readings or talks at Ecoyenta@aol.com.