Karen Christensen, CEO and Founder, Berkshire Publishing Group

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Karen Christensen is a publisher and writer specializing in sustainability, social networking, and China. She has edited award-winning academic works including the Encyclopedia of Community and is the author of a number of popular environmental books. She is CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, which she cofounded in 1998.

In addition to directing Berkshire's Sustainability Project, which launched in 2010 with volumes on The Spirit of Sustainability and The Business of Sustainability (Volumes 1 and 2 in a 10-volume Encyclopedia of Sustainability), Karen's own book the Armchair Environmentalist is out in a new U.S. Hachette edition. “Filled with wisdom…[there is] more environmental advice in this crisp, tightly written volume than in anything I've seen to date,” wrote Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and president of the Earth Policy Institute. Her environmental books have been translated into French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai.

Karen has been an active member of the board of the Content Division of the Software & Information Industry Association and She served on the advisory boards of the Society for New Communications Research and the Text Outline Project. She is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. She has a strong interest in social media and writes and speaks about online (and offline) community building. She spoke about social networking in China at the first Global Information Industry Summit in Amsterdam in September 2006 and on a panel about building online communities at the second GIIS in Berlin, 2007. She planned and moderated the China publishing panel at GIIS, and has spoken about Chinese publishing at the Fiesole Retreat, a library conference, and at BookExpo America. She was a featured speaker at the Wikipedia conference, known as Wikimania, in Boston in August 2006. She spoke about writing a CEO blog and moderated the final panel about Enterprise 2.0 at "Nurturing and Commercializing Online Communities," held in Shanghai, China, in November 2007. Her speaking engagements include Digital Now, Buying & Selling E-Content, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the Charleston Conference, and the American Historical Association annual conference.

In her nomination papers for the board of the SIIA, Karen wrote: “I am passionate about creating knowledge and getting it to the people who need to know; I believe that publishers are a powerful force for good in our world, and a crucial part of today’s world wide web of communication.” She writes and speaks about social media and social networking, first in a 2007 CEO Perspectives issue of the SIIA magazine Upgrade. She was guest editor of an issue of Against the Grain, choosing "Knowledge Innovation" as her theme. Karen has been involved in regional and national IT business organizations and initiated the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, edited by William Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation. For almost five years she served on the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee, where she was involved in curriculum alignment, library development, and technology applications for teachers and students.

Karen grew up in Minnesota and in the Silicon Valley in California. After graduating from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a tiny institution known as a graduate school for undergraduates, she went to London and began her publishing career at Blackwell Scientific Publications, working on a variety of scientific journals, and Faber & Faber, where she was editorial assistant to Valerie (Mrs. T. S.) Eliot on the first and so far only volume of the T. S. Eliot letters (1988). Her memoir of work on the T. S. Eliot letters, "Dear Mrs. Eliot," was the cover story in the U.K. newspaper the Guardian Review, 29 January 2005. Her letter about what Valerie Eliot called the "PhD industry" was published in the New Yorker in July 2006.

A 2010 magazine feature tells the story of Berkshire Publishing and how we became so engrossed by all things China, and provides some background on our staff and location, and some photographs (Karen is, however, more likely to be found in blue jeans than a silk jacket).

Her China-related activities include serving as publisher and editor of Guanxi: The China Letter, and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (Scribners 2002). She is also the author of 绿色生活 [Eco Living], first published in London by Piatkus Books, and published in China by Anhui Literature Publishing House, and one of the editors (as well as the publisher) of China Gold: China’s Quest for Global Power and Olympic Glory.

Interviews with Karen

Encyclopedia of China in World Journal newspaper May 2009

Interview in Booklist September 2009
Interview in Business Quarterly 2010
Interview in Library Journal: It's the Content, Stupid!
Interview: "Berkshire Goes to China" Publishers Weekly July 2008
Interview in BusinessWeek: "CEO's Tech Toolbox"
Profile in Against The Grain February 2010
Profile in The Women's Times September 2008
Interview with CEO bloggers in the Washington Post September 2006
Profile in Working Woman, April 2001
Berkshire China publications in Reference Reviews UK, 2010
Berkshire profile in Beijing Today November 2009

Books by Karen

Read Karen's daily updates at the Berkshire Blog and at Twitter. Many of Karen's published articles are available from the links here.

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