Karen J. Renner
PORTFOLIO
CREATIVE & PUBLIC WORK
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Fiction: “A History of New Bomer, pop. 2,402” (Soul Scream Antholozine Vol. 7, 2025), "Solving for X" (Bards & Sages Quarterly, 2021), “Second Wife” (The Sharpened Quill, 2017).
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Creative Nonfiction: "Heritage" (Estranged, 2026), “Afterword: Debunking the Myths" (Haunted Flagstaff, 2022), “The Cocktail as Fashion Accessory: A (Very) Brief Personal History Told through Drink” (Make Mine a Double, 2011).
MEDIA APPEARANCES
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Television: The Dead Files, “The Haunting of Flagstaff” (2022).
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Radio/Podcasts: "Evil Children in the Popular Imagination” (Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2021), “How Zombies Reflect Modern Fears” (Phoenix NPR, KJZZ, 2018), "Horror Genre Seems to Be Bleeding into Other Genres” (Phoenix NPR, KJZZ, 2017).
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Newspaper: "Halloween Horror in the (Super)Humanities" (The NAU Review, 2020), “Writer-in-Residence Karen Renner on Horror, Writing through Insecurity,” Arizona Daily Sun, 2019.
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Public presentations: “Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Children of the Corn” (Spooky Evenings, 2021), "The New Child Psycho" (Nights of Horror, 2020).
ACADEMIC WORK
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Book: Evil Children in the Popular Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
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Edited Collections: Emerging Trends in 21st-Century Horror (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2023). The ‘Evil Child’ in Literature, Film and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2013). Representations of the Apocalypse (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2012).
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Selected Articles and Chapters: “Violence in the School Shooter Film” (Handbook on Violence in Film and Media, 2022), “Poe and the Contemporary Serial Killer Narrative” (Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, 2019), “The Evil Aging Women of American Horror Story: Coven” (Elder Horror, 2019), “Millennials, Twenty-First Century Horror, and The Cabin in the Woods” (The Millennials on Film and Television, 2014), “Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento” (Film Studies, 2006).
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