POPMATTERS STAFF Karen Zarker (Editor, Columns) Click to email me As Columns Editor and occasional Special Features Sections Editor for PopMatters (among other miscellaneous tasks she does for the magazine), Karen Zarker finds herself working with the very kind of writers she loves to read; writers with smarts, wit and style on par with those of The Guardian, The New Yorker, Harper's and Granta, just to name a few of the publications she consumes regularly. Travel literature (such as the work of Paul Theroux) is her favorite literary genre, but it feeds only a fraction of her reading appetite. Her generalist nature seeks writers, musicians, filmmakers and other storytellers who are traveled (including those that have the mind of a traveler, if not the means), educated (academia has its merits, but so do multiple degrees from the school of hard knocks), broad-minded (those who realize that one can never really be certain, even when they're feeling righteous), intellectual (ibid, and the best intellectuals are also sensualists), compassionate (understanding that one need love only the idea of the individual, and not necessarily the individual himself) and have a sense of humor (because just about everything is pretty damned funny, even it makes you cry first). Having served as critical reader and editor for her professors while in college, she is devotedly a writer's reader and a writer's editor, and is absolutely thrilled that she gets to work at PopMatters. Her most indulgent personal purchase: a very comfortable reading chair. A graduate of Columbia College (Chicago, that is) with an undergraduate degree in English, Journalism and Liberal Education, she is a post-graduate reader of most everything but minds.