About Karen Yin

ACES Robinson Prize winner Karen Yin coined the term “conscious language” to refer to mindful and compassionate language and helped catapult conscious writing, editing, and design practices into the mainstream. She’s the author of children’s books and The Conscious Style Guide: A Flexible Approach to Language That Includes, Respects, and Empowers. She is also the founder of several acclaimed digital tools, including Conscious Style Guide, the first website devoted to conscious language; The Conscious Language Newsletter, its companion publication; Editors of Color, tools for diversifying your staff and sources; Diverse Databases, a database of more than a hundred databases that feature underrepresented communities; and AP vs. Chicago, a guide for anyone who gives “a dollar sign, ampersand, exclamation point, and pound sign about style.”

Conscious Style Guide was named by Poynter as one of the top tools for journalists in 2018 and is recommended by ACES, CMOS, BuzzFeed, SPJ, Poets & Writers, SCBWI, and many others, including NASA. A member of the Chicago Manual of Style Advisory Board, Karen has also been consulted by ACES, EFA, and AP Stylebook. She was the style columnist for Copyediting and has given talks on the craft of writing, conscious editing, and conscious language.

Prior, Karen was a copywriter and editor for over two decades. She ran the editorial department at advertising agencies, where she performed quality control on campaigns for Disney, DreamWorks, Fox, Pixar, Universal, and Warner Bros.

An award-winning fiction writer, Karen has received the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Fellowship (LGBTQ+), a Table 4 Writers Foundation grant, an SCBWI Nonfiction Grant, and the honor of having her flash fiction story “Nurse” in the L.A. Public Library’s permanent collection and Short Story Portal.

Karen’s debut picture book, Whole Whale, a story about making space, was published in 2021 by Barefoot Books, with award-winning illustrator Nelleke Verhoeff on board. So Not Ghoul, illustrated by Bonnie Lui, was published by Page Street Kids in 2022. Doug the Pug and the Kindness Crew, illustrated by Lavanya Naidu, was published by Scholastic in October 2022. Her short story “My Kinda Sorta Badass Move” appeared in Bridges and Islands: Twenty Stories from Multiracial and Multicultural Authors, a young adult anthology from Inkyard Press (winter 2023).  Nice to Eat You, illustrated by Carolina Coroa, will be published by Scholastic in 2025. For Karen’s picture book recommendations, visit DiversePictureBooks.com.

Newsletters:

• To stay in touch with Karen’s publishing career, subscribe to the Purposeful Prose Newsletter.
• To learn more about conscious language, subscribe to Karen’s Conscious Language Newsletter.

Karen Yin is represented by DeFiore and Company. Inquiries: Laurie Abkemeier. 

Speaker Statement: Karen supports equity and inclusivity in the world of books and beyond. She is not available for events that discriminate against historically excluded, marginalized, or underrepresented communities.