Karena Benke

Agent: Adriana Stimola

Karena Benke is a poet and an author of four books of creative non-fiction from Shambhala/Penguin Random House.

Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing is used by children, teens, teachers, and the international home-schooling community to inspire a love of poem- and story-making. Other books in the series include Leap Write In, Write Back Soon, and Rip ALL the Pages! 

Originally from California’s Bay Area, where she worked as a teaching-artist for nearly three decades with Poets in the Schools, she founded The Writer’s Nest in 2015, a mentorship program for young writers. Her books received favorable and starred reviews from Guernica: A Magazine of Global Art & Politics, ForeWord Reviews, Toronto Star, FamilyFun Magazine, School Library Journal, The Children’s Book Review and elsewhere. A recipient of a few awards and several fellowships, including a Poets & Writer’s Teaching Grant, her poems are published in anthologies and literary journals, including Ploughshares, Rattle, Poetry Daily, and Poetry East. 

A dual American-Italian citizen, she lives between the San Francisco Bay Area and Florence, Italy where she collaborated with celebrated chef, friend, and trattoria-owner, Matilde Pettini, on Lunch at Lola’s, a cookbook with recipes that Stanley Tucci praised and featured on Tucci in Italy. When not writing, she can be found enjoying homemade gelato and hiking near and far with good dog Razz.

Museletter, razziwrites, Website