Karen Brown is a radio and print journalist, based in Western Massachusetts, with a 25-year history of local and national reporting, personal essays, narrative pieces, audio documentaries and a podcast series.

She focuses on health, mental health, children’s issues, poverty, and other topics on the human condition.

She has been a full-time radio reporter since 1998 for New England Public Radio/WFCR, the NPR affiliate in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her stories have aired nationally on National Public Radio, American RadioWorks, Marketplace Radio, and other outlets.

Karen freelances widely for print and online publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NOVA Next, and Slate.

Karen also produces radio documentaries as a way to give more depth and voice to the topics she covers in her daily reporting. Documentary subjects have included PTSD (effects on relationships, delayed trauma symptoms), bipolar disorder in children, siblings of the mentally ill, hypochondria, primary care medicine, and mental health care for refugees.

She also directs the Global Fellowship on Early Childhood Development for the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma. The fellowship program, which started in 2019, trains international journalists on issues around early experience and brain growth.

In 2018, she co-produced her first narrative podcast, “The Great God of Depression,” with Pagan Kennedy. The five-part series was released by PRX’s Radiotopia (and reviewed in The New Yorker and The Guardian, among other places.)

In 2014, she spent a year reporting and writing on the future of primary care in America — as part of a fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists. The project resulted in a radio documentary and front-page story in The Boston Globe.

In 2012-13, she was a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT, where she focused on brain science and the effect of early experience on brain development.

For the 2008-2009 year, she was a Kaiser Media Fellow – which allowed her to focus on health reform in Massachusetts – what’s working, what’s not, and how people on the ground are affected. The program was funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation (no affiliation with Kaiser Permanente.)

In 2009, she authored a series of print reports, interviews, and audio podcasts on adolescent health, in conjunction with the National Institute for Health Care Management and its partners. The series was distributed widely among government agencies and adolescent health care providers and advocates.

Additional fellowships include the Ochberg/Dart Fellowship in Trauma Reporting, Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, and the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Fellowship on Health Care Performance.

Her pieces have won a number of national awards, including the National Edward R. Murrow Award, the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, New York Festival’s Silver Baton, Public Radio News Directors, Inc. (PRNDI) Award, the National Mental Health Association’s Media Award, a Gracie Allen Award from the Association of Women in Radio and Televison, Dart Award for Coverage of Trauma (Hon. Mention), and the Association of Health Care Journalists Award (First Place).

She also won the 2011 Erikson Prize for Mental Health Reporting for her body of work on mental illness.

Karen previously worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in its South Jersey bureau. She earned a Masters of Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996.

She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.