Karen A Pluemer

Karen has over 20 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. After working in-house as a Senior Production Editor for McGraw-Hill Higher Education, she launched Wise Owl Editorial, LLC, her own freelance editing and writing company, where she worked on several projects in various capacities including copyeditor, developmental editor, project manager, class test program manager, and technical writer.  Karen freelances for McGraw-Hill Higher Education as a technical writer and teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Karen is also a novelist and a screenwriter and was selected to participate in the 2013 Women in Film Mentorship Program and the 2014 CineStory Fellowship. She is a 2015 Semifinalist in Universal Studios Emerging Writers’ Fellowship, a 2015 Semifinalist for the CineStory Fellowship, a 2015 Second Rounder at the Austin Film Festival, a judge for the Austin Film Festival’s Screenwriting Competition since 2016, the CineStory Screenwriting Fellowship since 2018, and Hedgebrook’s 2019 Screenwriters Lab.  Most recently, she is a semi-finalist for the 2022 Stowe Story Labs Programs and Fellowships, a 2022 quarterfinalist for ScreenCraft Comedy Competition, and a quarterfinalist for the 2022 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards. In 2020, she was a Finalist for WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Screenwriting Lab and scored in the Top 10% of all entries for the 2020 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship. Her comedy script is in the Top 3% of all projects on Coverfly, an industry website.

In 2022, Karen was selected to attend a MSWL writing retreat in Ireland in July 2023 and will attend a Stowe Story Writers Retreat in Fall 2023. In 2019, Karen was selected to attend a Master Class taught by Elizabeth George, a New York Times best-selling author, in Tuscany, Italy, sponsored by Hedgebrook, a literary nonprofit organization that supports visionary women writers. Additionally, she was a finalist for a 2020 Hedgebrook Residency Fellowship scoring in the top 111 writers out of 1,325 applicants. She had been chosen to attend another writing workshop “Process and the Novel” with Elizabeth George in Tuscany in June 2022 (postponed indefinitely, unfortunately).

She has a master’s degree, a degree in Feature Film Writing from UCLA-Extension, and is a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association, the American Film Institute, Women in Film, and Mystery Writers of America.  

She owns a farm and lives in the Driftless area where she’s an avid gardener and herbalist. She has two dogs and an old horse who was a barrel racer in his younger years.