Karen Lazar is a poet, writing coach and an English lecturer at St Augustine College. She was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she also teaches part time. Her MA and PhD are in South African gender and literary studies. Her scholarship is mainly focused on feminist readings of Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, as well as on pedagogy and narrative medicine. Karen is an active advocate for gender and disability rights. She is the author of Hemispheres: inside a stroke (Cape Town: Modjaji Books 2011), which offers a first-person account of the stroke from which she has partially recovered. She lives in Johannesburg, and has a new book of creative writing forthcoming.