Karen Christensen, CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group

karen [AT] berkshirepublishing [DOT] com

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, including the Armchair Environmentalist, translated into French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. She is CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, which she cofounded in 1998.

Karen is a member of the board of the Content Division of the Software & Information Industry Association. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Society for New Communications Research and the Text Outline Project, and was recently made a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. She has a particular 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 for 2008 and 2009 include Digital Now, Buying & Selling E-Content, the Society for Scholary Publishing, and the American Historical Association.

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 has been active in the Google debate in the U.K., arguing against unfair, unauthorized digitization, and has written recent features on social media in Upgrade magazine, in the January 2007 CEO Perspectives issue, and for the library journal Against the Grain. 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, and is developing further interdisciplinary science and technology projects. 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 Christensen in London, 2006 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.

Her China-related activities include serving as publisher and acting editor of Guanxi: The China Letter, coeditor of the award-winning Global Perspectives on the United States: A Nation by Nation Survey, Volumes 1-3 (Berkshire 2007), 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 Olympic and Global Glory.

In addition to directing Berkshire's Sustainability Project, which launches in 2008 with volumes on the Business of Sustainability and the Spirit of Sustainability (Volumes 1 and 2 in a 10-volume Encyclopedia of Sustainability), Karen's own book the Armchair Environmentalist, is being published by Hachette in a new U.S. edition in 2008. 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.

Read Karen's daily updates at the Berkshire Blog. For China news and commentary, visit Berkshire's GuanxiBlogs and Karen's personal China blog, GuanxiBlogs.com/KarenChristensen.

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