Karen Hopkins grew up in Martinez, California on the San Francisco Bay. At seventeen she moved to Chile. After completing a university degree she went to work for Pan American Airlines based in London, England. She traveled in Europe, the Middle East, India, and South America. She and her husband shared a love of adventure and they worked together teaching school in Panama, working in the "most remote school in the United States"-Ticaboo, Utah, at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, on the Navajo Reservation, in Hermosillo, Mexico, at an inner city high school in Phoenix, and at Cochise College in Nogales, Arizona.
Karen has traveled extensively with her family in Mexico, Central and South America, planning stories and living real life adventures. She currently lives and writes at her home on the Mexican border.