Karen Coates

Karen Coates is Fellowship Editor at Mongabay.com and an independent writer, editor, and media trainer. Her work focuses on food, environment, health, and human rights, and she has built a career around reporting from the ground up, often in places where a community’s history, landscape, and daily life are tightly connected. She describes food as a natural entry point into people’s lives, and her reporting reflects that idea through stories that link meals, land, and survival. She began her journalism career at a small paper in a cold Wyoming boomtown, then expanded into a wide range of reporting, editing, and teaching roles. She was a correspondent at Gourmet and later held fellowships and appointments that trace a steady move through environmental, investigative, and international reporting. These include Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at University of Colorado-Boulder, T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at University of Montana School of Journalism, Senior Fellow at Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, International Center for Journalists fellow in Borneo, guest editor for a Global Press Journal special edition on Climate Change & Food Security, and International Reporting Project fellow in Timor-Leste. She also served as contributing editor at Sabor Journal and president at Society of Professional Journalists Rio Grande Chapter. Coates continues to work across editing, reporting, mentoring, and training. She is a fellow of International Women’s Media Foundation and a contributing editor of Archaeology. Her career reflects a strong commitment to field-based journalism and to helping shape the next generation of storytellers through editorial and training work. The places she says she works best are rainforests, rice paddies, village kitchens and kayaks, mountaintops and museums after hours, settings that match the kind of reporting she does best. She is drawn to stories that emerge from close observation and sustained attention, especially where food, environment, health, and human rights overlap. Her work remains rooted in the physical and human landscapes that make those subjects inseparable.