Karren LaLonde Alenier is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press), winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as the Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore.
In 1982, through New York’s School of Visual Arts, she worked with Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, on her poems about Gertrude Stein. Some of these poems became part of her opera libretto on Stein.
Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her jazz opera with composer William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes premiered at New York City’s Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia in June 2005.
She writes feature articles and interviews, an arts blog called The Dressing, and a monthly column on Gertrude Stein for Scene4 Magazine at scene4.com. She is author of The Steiny Road To Operadom: The Making Of American Operas, a book about contemporary opera.
Since 2013, she has been leading an international online study group on Gertrude Stein’s long poem Tender Buttons. The results of those in-depth studies can be seen on her blog at Alenier.blogspot.com.
She is a graduate of the University of Maryland College Park in French language and literature and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Since 1986, she has worked in a leadership role with the literary nonprofit The Word Works, promoting contemporary American poetry. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her husband Jim Rich. She enjoys spending time with her son Ivan and his family in Middletown, New Jersey.

The Anima of Paul Bowles, a poetry collection by Karren LaLonde Alenier, is now available from MadHat Press.